By Dan Ambrose: WBA/WBO super bantamweight champion Guillermo Rigondeaux (14-0, 9 KOs) finished up his contract with Top Rank last Saturday night in blasting out the hapless Sod Kokietgym in one easy round in Macao, China. In perhaps the unkindest cut of all, Rigondeaux’s fight wasn’t televised by HBO2 in the United States.
Instead of Rigondeaux’s fight, if you want to call it that, being shown in the U.S, boxing fans had to sit through fights between Zou Shiming vs. Luis De La Rosa and super middleweight Gilberto Ramirez vs. Junior Talipeau. Rigondeaux was light years ahead of Shiming and Ramirez in talent, and yet HBO passed on Rigondeaux to put on fights involving those two.
Rigondeaux’s best bet is for him to get signed up by a company like Golden Boy Promotions, because Showtime might be interested in televising Rigondeaux’s fights, especially given how exciting he looked in destroying Kokietgym.
Rigondeaux is a top pound-for-pound type talent, but his problem is he hasn’t been matched up against the best fighters. He’s in a division where none of the top super bantamweights want anything to do with him, so he can’t force them to fight him. Rigondeaux has called out Leo Santa Cruz, Carl Frampton, Kiko Martinez and Scott Quigg, and heard nothing.
Rigondeaux is just too good that none of the guys want to tangle with him right now while he’s still in his prime. They might change their minds when he starts looking like a shot fighter, but right now there is absolutely no interest. That’s the bad part about Rigondeaux signing with someone like Golden Boy. They can sign him, but it’s going to be tough to try and find guys that actually want to fight him.
Rigondeaux has talked about wanting to move up in weight to featherweight to go after Top Rank’s fighters Vasyl Lomachenko, Nonito Donaire, Evgeny Gradovich and Nicholas Walters. Unfortunately now that Rigondeaux is no longer with Top Rank, he’d be wasting his time if he moved up in weight, because he’s not likely to get any of those fights.
Bob Arum of Top Rank isn’t going to want to risk having one of his fighters in his stable beaten badly and embarrassed by Rigondeaux; not after what Rigondeaux did to Arum’s 2012 Fighter of the Year Donaire in beating him last year in April. The last thing Arum probably wants right now is for Rigondeaux to clean out his featherweight stable one by one in beating Lomachenko, Donaire [again], Gradovich and Walters.
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