by David P. Greisman

For 33 fights, Kendall Holt claimed, he had never come into a boxing match with a certain strategy in mind. That wasn’t going to be the case for his bout this past Friday with Lamont Peterson.

“This is going to be the first fight where I've walked into the ring with an actual game plan,” he had said two days before the bout, according to Tim Starks of Queensberry-Rules.com.

And he was following his game plan on Friday against Peterson, he said afterward, only for the fight to end with him losing via eighth-round technical knockout.

“For the most part, I was sticking to my game plan,” he said at the post-fight press conference on Friday. “I wanted to move a little bit. I wanted to turn Lamont. I wanted to keep him looking for me. I wanted to establish my jab. The second portion of the fight, I felt, you know what, we can go toe-to-toe. I was confident in my conditioning. I was confident in my power. I was confident in my team.

“I can’t really pinpoint what happened, what went wrong,” Holt said. “I know he caught me.”

Peterson said afterward that he amped up the pressure after ensuring that he could handle what he felt were Holt’s most dangerous punches. Peterson’s attack, of course, included a dedicated focus on Holt’s body — a focus Holt said he was prepared for.

“I felt the body shots, but I was in good shape,” Holt said afterward. “I didn’t feel like they diminished anything. I have to watch the tape.”

The tape will show that Peterson began to let his hands go in the fourth round, hurting Holt, and that Peterson never gave Holt a chance to recover afterward.

David P. Greisman is a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. Follow David on Twitter @fightingwords2 or send questions/comments via email at fightingwords1@gmail.com