By Chris Williams: If Golden Boy Promotions is still interested in putting together the Abner Mares vs. Nonito Donaire bout then they’ll have to wait until Donaire fights on April 13th on HBO because they’re receiving resistance from Donaire’s promoters. Bob Arum, Donaire’s promoter, told Steve Kim and Maxoxing.com that Donaire is committed to that fight date, and he can’t fight Mares on in June. However, Arum is clear that the fight will need to be on HBO rather than Showtime, the network that Mares fights on.
Mares’ promoter Richard Schaefer of Golden Boy Promotions is open to making the Mares-Donaire fight on April 13th if that’s the date that Arum wants. However, Schaefer does have a problem with Arum just sticking to HBO without considering Showtime since Schaefer wants to first see which network will pay the most money for the Mares-Donaire fight rather than locking the fight into a network that may not pay as much as the other. Being a businessman, Schaefer wants to maximize revenue by seeing what the market will bring for the fight.
It doesn’t look like Arum is interested in putting the fight together with Golden Boy and Mares. He may show a lot of interest later on in the year after Donaire takes care of his April 13th date, and that’s a big if. We still don’t know positively who Donaire will be facing on that date. Top Rank fighter Guillermo Rigondeaux has been mentioned as a possibility, but then again so has Vic Darchinyan. It’s going to be interesting to see which one Arum picks out for Donaire to fight.
One gets the sense that Arum is going to let the Mares fight slip away just like he did with the Floyd Mayweather Jr. fight for his #1 fighter Manny Pacquiao in 2010 when the two fighters were close to having a fight put together. When the two reached a stalemate over the random blood testing that Mayweather Jr. wanted for the fight, Arum halted the negotiations and put Pacquiao in with one of his Top Rank stable fighters Joshua Clottey, and that was the end of any Mayweather-Pacquiao discussion. It was clearly a missed opportunity for Arum and Pacquiao because they didn’t take the fight when it was there.
That would have been the perfect time to make the fight, but it was if Arum assumed that the fight could be made at a later date instead of putting the effort into making it right then. In hindsight, it was a huge mistake because the future negotiations have gone nowhere, and now there’s no point in Mayweather and Pacquiao fighting because Pacquiao has lost his last two fights.
I think Arum and Donaire might be sorry if they don’t make the fight with Mares next because that $3 million offer to Donaire might not be there in the future, and Donaire may lose his next fight if Arum finally matches him tough by putting him in with Rigondeaux.
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