IBF welterweight champion Jaron ‘Boots’ Ennis (34-0, 30 KOs) was in his groove on Saturday night, beating the brakes off WBA champ Eimantas Stanionis (15-1, 9 KOs), winning a sixth round corner stoppage in a unification fight at the Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Ennis dropped Stanionis in the final seconds of round six after taking a couple of big shots. When the round ended, he looked like a beaten man when he went back to his corner. Stanionis’ trainer wisely chose not to send him out for the seventh round and had the referee, David Field, stop the bout. The official time was at 3:00 of round six.

Ennis had controlled most of the fight with his boxing and punching. He was a lot more fluid than Stanionis, and landing at will. When Eimantas, 30, would get close, Boots would often tie him up in a clinch to prevent him from landing his short power punches. That strategy worked well.

Southpaw Shift

What was surprising was how Ennis fought out of the southpaw stance for most of the fight, as he normally fights in the orthodox stance. Tonight, he looked like a natural southpaw, fighting as well out of that stance as Terence Crawford.

However, Ennis wasn’t fighting super-talented fighters. It might have been a different story if Boots had attempted to fight southpaw against WBO Brian Norman Jr. or Vergil Ortiz Jr. or some of the 154-lb killers.

Stanionis suffered a small cut over his right eye in the second round. In the fourth, Boots landed a storm of hard punches late in the round that bloodied Stanionis’ nose. Although Stanionis came back to fight well in the fifth, you could tell that he was wearing down from the accumulation of punches that Ennis was hitting him with. It was taking a lot out of him.

In the sixth, Ennis teed off on the bloody & battered Staniionis, hitting him and will and showboating to the crowd with his moves. He was clowning, toying with Stanionis the way a cat does with a mouse before eating it.