By Jason Kim: Having wasted a perfect opportunity to get a big payday for his fighters Juan Manuel Lopez and Yuriorkis Gamboa by failing to set up a fight between the two because their promoter Bob Arum wanted the fight marinate more to bring more of a bigger return for all those involved, Arum is left with a badly beaten Lopez after his 8th round stoppage win to little known featherweight contender Orlando Salido. Lopez was badly beaten in a mostly one-sided fight.

It was one of those defeats that left no question about who the better fighter was. Now Lopez is talking about wanting to have an immediate rematch with Salido to try and avenge the bitter defeat. I don’t think he should do that. You can forget about the Gamboa vs. Lopez fight. That’s history now. Arum needs to skip even thinking about that match-up, because Lopez was badly exposed by Salido. Arum needs to downsize his goals for Lopez and look instead to let his rematch with Salido marinate more so that it can be a bigger payday.

It won’t be huge if they fight right now, but if Arum lets it marinate or a year or so, Salido and Lopez will have been seen enough by the casual boxing fans for them to look forward to seeing the Lopez vs. Salido 2 rematch. It’s a win-win fight for Arum and the fighters. But forget about the big fight between Lopez and Gamboa. That was a missed opportunity.

Boxing fans had been pushing to see the Lopez-Gamboa fight for a long time, but Arum had resisted putting the two fighters together, even after Lopez was almost knocked out by Rogers Mtagwa in 2009. Perhaps another promoter would have seen that as a warning sign that Lopez isn’t someone that will be able to hold onto his title for too much longer. The smart thing would have been to turn off the oven and forget about letting the Gamboa-Lopez fight marinate any longer. The fight should have taken place almost immediately after that. It was too dangerous to keep letting Lopez fight tough opponents when his chin was exposed the way it was in the Mtagwa fight.

Lopez was later knocked down by Bernabe Concepcion in a 2nd round knockout win. And in his last fight he was hurt by Rafael Marquez. Arum was taking a big chance by letting Lopez fight all these bouts and seeing him get hurt like this, and yet still not getting a clue that he needs to stop marinating the Gamboa-Lopez fight and let them finally go at it. Now all we have is Salido-Lopez 2 to look forward to and there’s a good chance Lopez will be stopped once again. For this reason, Arum needs to lower his ambitions a little and start letting the rematch between those two fighters marinate.