Arum: Donaire fighting Mares doesn’t make sense because of his questionable win over Agbeko

By Boxing News - 08/14/2011 - Comments

Image: Arum: Donaire fighting Mares doesn’t make sense because of his questionable win over AgbekoBy Eric Thomas: It looks as if IBF bantamweight champion Abner Mares won’t be getting a big money unification fight against WBC/WBO bantamweight champion Nonito Donaire after his promoter Bob Arum of Top Rank pretty much shot that idea down because of the circumstances surrounding Mares’s win over Joseph Agbeko last Saturday night.

Mares defeats Agbeko by a 12 round majority decision in a fight in which Mares fouled Agbeko repeatedly during the entire fight while the referee Russell Mora stood idly by giving little more than an occasional warning to Mares.

The outcome appears to be tainted in the eyes of many boxing fans, and Arum isn’t eager to step in between a possible Agbeko-Mares rematch to let his fighter Donaire fight a tainted Mares. Don King, the promoter for Agbeko, is already petitioning the International Boxing Federation to have Agbeko given an immediate rematch due to the excessive low blows that Mares landed.

If the IBF mandates an immediate rematch, Mares won’t have any other option but to fight Agbeko once more. You can bet that Mora won’t be the referee next time around if there is a next time.

This is what Arum said to ringtv: “Mares should do is to give this guy a rematch. I think that the IBF is going to order a rematch because that was not good…Donaire would be pleased to fight the winner of the rematch in a heartbeat, without any question. We’ll fight the winner of the rematch between Mares-Agbeko. But to go in and to have Donaire fight Mares now, when he clearly had a questionable victory, that wouldn’t make much sense.”

That leaves Mares with few options. The bantamweight division doesn’t have a lot of names as it is, and with Donaire not fighting him because of the controversy, Mares needs to give Agbeko a rematch.

Mares previously had a problem with throwing low blows in his fight before Agbeko against Vic Darchinyan. Mares landed a huge number of low blows all throughout the fight. While it wasn’t as many as he threw in the Agbeko bout, it was still a considerable amount that strayed low in that fight. Darchinyan was more than a little unhappy after the fight and he protested the low blows by creating a video of all them and sending it to Showtime.



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