By Dan Ambrose: 37-year-old Vic Darchinyan (38-5-1, 27 KO’s) is ready and willing to step in for WBA World super bantamweight champion Guillermo Rigondeaux to face Top Rank fighter WBO super bantamweight champion Nonito Donaire (31-1, 20 KO’s) on April 13th at Madison Square Garden, in New York.
According to Steve Kim, Rigondeaux has been offered $750,000 to face Donaire on April 13th, but there appears to be some problems that are keeping the fight from getting made. Its likely Donaire and his promoter Bob Arum will quickly move on and face Darchinyan instead on that date.
Darchinyan seems to be pretty excited about taking the fight with Donaire, saying to fightnews.com “I deserve the chance to fight him before a glass jawed bum like Rigondeux. Who is Rigondeux to be even in the same ring as Nonito?”
The Darchinyan-Donaire fight will likely draw better ratings on HBO than a Donaire-Rigondeaux fight, so you don’t really lose much if Arum can’t match Donaire with Rigondeaux. The one really negative thing about matching Donaire with Darchinyan again is that Donaire destroyed Darchinyan six years ago in a 5th round knockout when Darchinyan was in the prime of his career.
That was Darchinyan at his best, and he wasn’t good enough to even go five rounds with Donaire. Now six years, Darchinyan has lost two out of his last three fights and he’s showing serious signs of deterioration in his skills. Darchinyan did win his last fight against previously unbeaten Luis Orlando Del Valle, but in his two fights before that, he was beaten easily by Anselmo Moreno and Shinsuke Yamanaka.
HBO might prefer to see Donaire fight someone unbeaten like Rigondeaux than to have Donaire fighting a struggling ex-world champion like Darchinyan. HBO will probably say yes to Donaire-Darchinyan because if they said yes to the badly faded Jorge Arce and Toshiaki Nishioka as Donaire’s opponents last year, then they’ll probably say yes to Darchinyan because he would beat both of those guys no problem, even now. Darchinyan already easily beat Arce in 2009 when he was younger, and he has no problems.
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