“WHAT’S joke to you, is death to me,” the fabled frog was said to have uttered in the face of danger.

Richard ‘Frog’ Holmes found himself in a similar situation when he took a vicious poking from Sakimo Mullings in their 2014 Wray & Nephew Contender Boxing series quarter-final contest at the Chinese Benevolent Association Auditorium on Wednesday night.

With the fifth-round TKO win, Sakimo Mullings now moved into the semi-final stages.

Holmes, the younger and less experienced of the two Team Jamaica fighters, was very much in the contest up to the fourth round, and by his own admission, “he caught me with some good body shots in the fourth round”.

And from that moment on Holmes began to lose his earlier zip and sting.

Mullings seized the moment from thence, and entering the fifth round, pressed home his advantage to become the third fighter to make it into the semi-final of the Welterweight contest after pinning Holmes against the ropes delivering a barrage of unanswered body shots.

He will now join Tsetsi Davis of Team Jamaica and Howard ‘Battersea Bomber’ Eastman of Team Caribbean in the semi-finals. The other semi-final spot will be decided next Wednesday when Team Jamaica’s Donovan ‘Police’ Campbell and Christopher ‘Shaka’ Henry of Team Caribbean clash.

In last Wednesday’s humdinger, satisfied that Holmes had taken enough punishment without responding, referee Ransford Burton stepped in at one minute 14 seconds of the round and stopped the contest in favour of Mullings by the TKO route.

It was a premature end to a fight that showed great promise with the younger Holmes showing enough to suggest that he has a sound future ahead of him in the sport, while giving as much as he received in the opening three rounds.

At the end of the contest, a fully conscious Holmes was asked if he was relieved that the referee had stopped the fight: “No I was never relieved,” he replied. “I never expected him to stop the fight still; if I thought he was going to stop the fight I would have moved. All that I was doing while Mullings was working was to cover up, catch breath and work again,” Holmes added.

Holmes, who looked a bit challenged to respond before the referee stepped in and stopped the fight, disagreed with the observation that he was helpless at that stage.

Mullings was not a bit surprised when referee Burton stopped the fight. “He was done. Earlier in the fight he was coming off the ropes and when he stayed there he let me maintain my distance and I was just picking my shots at that point – body, middle, body, middle. He allowed me to pick my shots and so I just continued to pick them until he gave in or the referee stopped the fight,” said the victor.

With unfinished business still ongoing, Mullings sounded a warning to all those who remain in the Contender contest that they should look over their shoulders as he will be coming.

“Shots have been fired. All you guys who think that I will run out of gas, guess again. It happened to me one time in all my amateur and professional careers, but you’ll never see that happening to me again. I am in great shape,” Mullings warned.