Eye injury takes gloss off Lee’s sixth victory

ANDY LEE will push back his next fight to late December following the sixth victory of his professional career at Madison Square Garden.

The Detroit-based Limerick middleweight, a protégé of Kronk Gym trainer Emanuel Steward, scored an unanimous points win after six rounds against experienced New Jersey fighter Dennis Sharpe on Saturday night to move to 6-0 since his March debut.

Fighting on the Wladimir Klitschko-Calvin Brock heavyweight title card, a cut to Lee’s right eyelid sustained in a fifth-round clash of heads, however, required six stitches and the 22-year-old has cancelled plans for a mid-December fight in Chicago on an HBO card. It also places in doubt his participation in world middleweight champion Jermain Taylor’s current training camp.

Taylor, who sparred with Lee to prepare for his title defence against Winky Wright earlier this year, is hooking up with Steward in Miami next weekend to train for his December 9 fight against former champion Kassim Ouma. Lee was scheduled alongside the other Kronk fighters to shift base from Detroit to Florida for the camp but the Irishman said: “I’m not sure what’s going to happen now. I’ll speak to Emanuel and we’ll make a decision.

“If we decide I’m not going to fight it’s not the end of the world. It’s been a good year, my first year as a pro, with six good wins, and I’ve made a good impact. I’ll go home and get plenty of time to heal and come back in the new year and get the whole thing going again.

“Having said that, if we can get a fight in late December then maybe we’ll go again. The December 16 date I was aiming for will probably be too close for the cut healing. Emanuel was trying to put me and (North American cruiserweight champion) Johnathon Banks on an HBO ‘After Dark’ card but it will just be Johnathon on that. I don’t want to risk this becoming a serious injury.

“It wasn’t a deep cut but it took six stitches. The stuff they put on the cut started dripping into my eye during the sixth. So I had no vision in my right eye for the last round, but you have to deal with these things in the ring.”

Lee said his Madison Square Garden debut took his pro boxing education to another level: “I learned a lot in this fight. I think it’s been the most I’ve learned from any fight, inside and outside of the ring. And now I’ll have the scar to remind me of the mistakes I made and not to make them again.”