By Chris Williams: The Golden Boy promoted WBC featherweight champion Abner Mares (26-0-1, 14 KO’s) says he wants to face WBA/WBO super bantamweight champion Guillermo Rigondeaux next if the fight can be put together successful.
Mares, 27, defeated former WBC featherweight champion Daniel Ponce De Leon earlier this month in a 9th round stoppage on May 4th. It was an impressive performance Mares, as he walked through a lot of hard punches from De Leon before finally halting him in the 9th round.
Mares said to Fightnews.com “I am ready to face Guillermo Rigondeaux among others.”
Top Rank promoter Bob Arum might actually be interested in making this fight because he really doesn’t have a lot of other options for Rigondeaux fight now because it doesn’t look like he’s going to put Nonito Donaire back in with him after the way Rigondeaux dominated him last month in a 12 round unanimous decision.
Donaire isn’t pushing for the rematch either. Arum complained after the fight that it would be hard to find opponents for Rigondeaux. He can’t say this if Mares is interested in fighting Rigondeaux because that’s the best fight he can get for Rigondeaux.
The only problem with this fight is how to put it together. Golden Boy made an offer to Top Rank recently for a fight between Mares and Donaire and the offer was rejected. However, that was with Donaire, who has a huge Filipino fan base in the United States and perhaps Arum wasn’t comfortable with that risky fight due to the high chances of Donaire losing.
Now that Donaire is out of the picture, Arum might want to agree to put Rigondeaux in with Mares because this is as good as it gets for Rigondeaux. There isn’t anything better than this for Rigondeaux. I think this would be a better fight than asking Rigondeaux to move up in weight to fight his fighter WBO featherweight champion Mikey Garcia.
I think Rigondeaux will beat Mares if this fight gets made. Rigondeaux is too fast and he’d give Mares all kinds of problems with his defensive skills, fast hands and counter punching. I’m not sure if Golden Boy would say yes to this fight, though.
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