Johnny Eames’ TRAD TKO Boxing Gym in Canning Town, deep in the heart of the East End of London, is renowned for producing champions, Kevin Lear, Graham Earl, Tony Oakey, Matthew Marsh, Martin Power, Ashley Theophane, Ross Minter etc. being some of it’s early successes.
More recently the likes of Kevin Mitchell, Billy Joe Saunders, Leon Williams, Colin Lynes, Ben Murphy, Erick Ochieng and Danny Connor have collectively added to the silverware.
On Sunday a new name, Areti Mastrodouka, was added to the ever growing roll call of Champions at the famous fight factory.
Yep that’s right a female boxer has emerged from what many would deem to be the last remaining bastion of male testosterone, a hardcore East London Boxing gym, to win her first title.
More surprisingly Areti secured her first Championship belt, the International Masters Super Featherweight Title, on just her fourth professional outing.
Athens born Areti did it in style, boxing beautifully and winning every round against tough Welsh battler Lana Cooper.
Joining Areti in victory circle, was one of Johnny’s latest signings, eighteen year old Tommy Martin, from Cambridge, who got off to a flying start, stopping Lithuanian Artur Saniuk in the third round on his maiden outing.
Also victorious was TRAD TKO trained Eren Arif on just his second pro outing, Eren secured a 39-37 points victory over the seriously tough Lithuanian Aleksas Vaseris.
Earlier today Johnny Eames recalled Sunday’s action and the excellent victories by the TRAD TKO’s young guns.
“First up was Eren Arif, who I don’t actually manage, but he’s trained by Alec (Wilkey) who is part of our coaching staff here, so he’s a TRAD TKO fighter.
Good performance, just a few things that need altering on him, like he waits too long before he actually makes his attack, but when he attacks he’s quite aggressive.
He made hard work of the fight to be fair, it was a hard fight, the other kid was tough, but he won the fight comfortably.
He picked up a few marks, I’m sure his girlfriend or his mum will be not be too pleased with us today after they look at his face, but that’s boxing.
Next up was Areti Mastrodouka in TRAD TKO’s first Women’s title fight, fighting Lana Cooper.
How brave is Lana Cooper, most girls that I’ve seen would have quit, but she hung in there for eight rounds, but took a terrible beating.
For the whole eight rounds I was really impressed with Areti’s boxing repertoire, the shots she was throwing half the boys up here can’t throw ‘em.
I mean she boxed absolutely to orders, anything we asked her to do in the corner she did, within reason.
Great body punching mixed up with punches upstairs to the head. Round after round Lana took a beating and she kept coming out, which says a lot about her courage.
But really there was only one winner at the end of the fight and it’s good to see that despite my reservations on Women’s boxing I was quite impressed again with our Areti, it was a great win.
Then after that we had a perfect debut, from another of our new signings, little Tommy Martin, I was mightily impressed by him and he had a great crowd there for him, in excess of two hundred people.
He came out first round, a little bit nervous, tried to hard, didn’t do things right.
He got back to the corner, Alec got him settled down in the corner and gave him some good instructions.
He went out the second round, he caught the kid in the second round with a good flush shot and then it looked like the kid was going to go.
By the end of the round Tommy looked like he was treading water, he’d punched himself out by the end of the second round.
He came back to the corner and we gave him some harsh words, like taking his time and stuff like that. He walked out and produced two fantastic body shots which put an end to the fight.
You know, for an eighteen year old kid on his pro debut and I’m sure if Tommy keeps his feet on the ground and he gets back in the gym sooner rather than later, although he wont be fighting again before February, at eighteen years of age we’ve got plenty of time so am sure we can do things with him.
I’m sure if the crowds keep coming it wont be long before the big promoters will be calling out him to be on their shows.
Well done Tommy and well done the other two.”
www.tkoboxinggym.com
