By Chris Williams: Yuriorkis Gamboa did it again, blowing off a second press conference on Tuesday to promote his scheduled April 14th fight against lightweight Brandon Rios. It was no real surprise that Gamboa opted not to show, as he failed to show up for the Monday press conference in Miami, Florida and few people figured he’d show for the LA conference.

There’s talk that Gamboa might be wanting to get out of his promotional contract with Top Rank and Arena to instead sign for Mayweather Promotions. Whether that’s true is unclear, but he may have a hard time getting out of the contract unless he’s had someone comb through the fine print to spot a loophole to where he can get out of the contract.

As for the Rios fight, Gamboa is saying that he never signed the contract to fight Rios. Todd Duboef, the president of Top Rank, says he had a deal for Gamboa to fight Rios. Duboef said “At this point, Top Rank and Gamboa are bound to each other. Any determination otherwise will be made by our lawyers. But as far as I’m concerned, we’re promoting Brandon Rios against Gamboa. Gamboa agreed to the terms personally, not through an agent or anyone else. My attorneys have all the evidence.”

There it is. If Gamboa signed a contract to fight Rios then he could be forced to take the fight or risk having to deal with Top Rank in court. It obviously cost them a lot of money to set up both the Miami and Los Angeles press conferences and you’d have to wonder if Gamboa would have to pay the costs of that if he bails on the fight in addition to other penalties. Of course, they don’t want to burn their bridges with their own fighter so they need to be delicate about this. An unhappy Gamboa won’t be a benefit to anyone and they might be better off letting him buy out his contract.

DuBoef is offering an extra $100,000 to the winner of the Gamboa-Rios fight as a small bonus. Both fighters are already getting the biggest payday of their careers for this fight. The $100,000 bonus seems almost like chicken feed when you see the kind of money that fighters get for taking on Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao. However, Gamboa has never made more than $400,000, so the $100,000 represents a lot of money when you think about it. It might not be worth the risk involved for Gamboa, though, because he’s moving up two entire weight divisions to take on a fighter that is already too heavy for the weight class, so it’s like Gamboa is moving up three divisions in reality. Rios is really puts on weight after he rehydrates and the featherweight Gamboa will be taking on practically a welterweight or junior middleweight sized Rios by the time he sets foot in the ring. While I can see Gamboa beating someone one or two divisions above his weight, I can’t see him beating a fighter three to four divisions above him like a bloated up Rios. I’m not impressed with $100,000 when you look at the HUGE risk Gamboa is taking to move up all these weight classes for this fight. It looks like a no win situation if you ask me and I would have never let him take this fight if I was his adviser. He needed to have Rios meet him at super featherweight at least. Rios would still rehydrate up but at least he wouldn’t go all the way up to upper levels of the welterweight division.