Nicholas Walters out to erase perception of being one-dimensional fighter

Nicholas Walters is in pretty good company. As Top Rank vice president Carl Moretti speaks about the WBA featherweight champion, he drops the names Gennady Golovkin, Sergey Kovalev and Wladimir Klitschko.

Those three are the middleweight, light heavyweight and heavyweight champions, respectively, and between them have won by knockout in 84.4 percent of their fights. They've combined for 108 knockouts in 128 bouts, going 124-3-1.

Walters, who faces Miguel Marriaga on Saturday in the main event of an HBO card in the Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York, is 25-0 with 21 knockouts.

Unquestionably, he belongs with Golovkin, Kovalev and Klitschko as one of the sport's biggest punchers.

"The guy punches like a [expletive] mule," Top Rank chairman Bob Arum said of Walters.

Yet Walters tries to insist he's a boxer first. Now, anyone who has seen "The Axeman" in the ring would never confuse him with a Willie Pep, Pernell Whitaker, Floyd Mayweather or a Guillermo Rigondeaux.

Jamaica is known for the inordinate number of sprinters it has produced, such as world record holder Usain Bolt. Walters, who said he played cricket with Bolt when they were kids, is the first boxing world champion from Jamaica. He is the antithesis of a runner.

He gets into the ring and starts slugging away. It's almost as if he sees boxing as a war of attrition.There is no slipping, sliding or ducking from punches. It's full-on assault from beginning until end.

"I can't imagine anyone looking at him and calling him a boxer," Moretti said. "He's clearly one of the best punchers out there right now. He gets hit. He does. The question going into the [Nonito] Donaire fight was how he could take it."

Walters destroyed former world champion Vic Darchinyan on May 31, 2014, in Macau, when he shared a card with Donaire. He was so impressive that it forced Top Rank to pit him against Donaire, who was the 2012 Fighter of the Year.

It was no contest. At the end of the third round, Donaire clocked Walters cleanly on the chin. It was the kind of blow that Donaire used to hurt or drop countless previous opponents. Walters, though, took it and fired back a vicious right hand of his own, never flinching or taking a backward step.

But Walters doesn't like to be perceived as one-dimensional.

"I am a well-rounded fighter," he said. "I can punch, this is true, but I'm a very intelligent fighter in the ring. I know myself and I know I can box when I have to and I punch when I have to."

The bout figures to be explosive from the beginning. Marriaga, who defeated Walters in an amateur fight in 2008 that kept Walters from making the Beijing Olympics, is 20-0 with 18 knockouts. Between the two, they're 45-0 with 39 knockouts.

And that leads to the inescapable conclusion that the judges won't be necessary in this fight.

"Both of these guys are huge punchers," Arum said. "This is one of these fights you don't want to miss, because both of them get hit a lot and both of them punch extremely hard. There won't be any of this [expletive] running around. You watch this fight, you're going to get a fight, a real fight."

Walters said he needs to win the fight to set up a unification match later this year with Vasyl Lomachenko. Arum said there is interest from a group in Dubai about including a potential Lomachenko-Walters fight on a show there in November, which he said would include multiple championship matches if it occurs.

Walters said he's down for it, even though it's getting increasingly difficult for him to make the featherweight limit of 126 pounds. He might be the biggest featherweight in the world and could be at lightweight by this time next year.

But first, he wants to get a good report card in his fight with Marriaga.

"According to his record, he's a big puncher and I'm heavy-handed, too," Walters said. "I want to get an A+ in this fight and the only way to go home with the A+ is to get the knockout. I don't want an A- or a B+. I'm not going to settle for that. I want that A+ and I'm going to go for it."