Undefeated middleweight prospect Peter “Kid Chocolate” Quillin may be a prizefighter, rather than a baseball player, but never-the-less the talented Cuban-American plans to hit a curveball out of the park Saturday night in Las Vegas.
Coming off of an explosive third-round destruction of former world title challenger Jesse Brinkley this past April for the USBO super middleweight title, Quillin (24-0, 18 KOs) prepared for the last eight weeks to fight once again in his natural weight class against veteran middleweight “Marvelous” Tarvis Simms (27-1-1, 11 KOs), a southpaw, in a10-round bout on Saturday night’s Amir Khan vs. Zab Judah undercard at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.
Quillin-Simms, however, was recently cancelled when Tarvis reportedly broke a rib in training camp. Now, the International Boxing Federation No. 5-rated Quillin, fighting out of Los Angeles, faced an entirely different fighter, Jason “The Hammer” LeHoullier(21-5-1, 8 KOs).
“I sparred and trained to fight a southpaw, Simms, and now I’m fighting a right-handed boxer,” Quillin said. “Hey, I’m a fighter and I can adjust to anybody. When Simms fell out all I cared about was still fighting. Jason LeHoullier stepped in and took a fight with 1 ½ weeks to go and that’s something not many guys would do against a top-level fighter like me. I’m not taking anything away from him because fighters like him can be dangerous. He may be coming in here trying to shock the world, tired of hearing people say he can’t win, and that could cause problems. But I am totally focused on him. I know he’s a guy who puts it all on the line, but he’s facing a guy who can box and is a big puncher. I’m going to set him up and, then, bang like a firecracker.”
Quillin has received a lot of attention lately because his trainer, Freddie Roach, went public saying ‘Kid Chocolate” can beat world middleweight champion Sergio Martinez. “I would have been ready to fight Sergio Martinez on July 23,”Quillin added. “Physically, I’m ready and I would have been 10 times more ready mentally for that fight. For now, though, I’m 100-percent focused on Jason LeHoullier. After this fight I’ll be ready to fight anybody in the world, including Sergio Martinez. The sky’s the limit for me. If everything goes right Saturday night, I’d like to comeback right away and fight September 17. But I’m not into the business end of boxing, I’m a fighter, and I’ll let my promoter, Golden Boy Promotions, and manager, John Seip, take care of that.”
Quillin-LeHoullier is a scheduled 10-round bout on the non-televised portion of the Khan-Judah world junior welterweight unification fight on HBO.
