By Jason Kim: Former WBA lightweight champion Brandon Rios is a fighter without a fight right now, as his scheduled April 14th opponent Yuriorkis Gamboa has blown of their two press conferences and it doesn’t look too promising that he’ll bother showing up next month in their fight at the at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Rio’s promoter Todd DuBoef of Top Rank is still going through with the card with the belief that Gamboa will somehow show up on the night to take the fight, but that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. Rios obviously is upset about it and sees it as a case of Gamboa chickening out. Whatever the case, Top Rank is going to have a make a decision about getting a possible backup to replace Gamboa or risk putting Rios out there and having no one walk in the ring to meet him.

Rios told examiner.com that he’d really like to take on WBC lightweight champion Antonio DeMarco (26-2-1, 19 KO’s) next if possible. If not, then Rios would like to move up in weight to the light welterweight division. DeMarco, however, already has a fight scheduled for March 17th against Miguel Roman and it’s unclear whether he’d be excited in facing Rios after that. Rios can barely make the 135 pound division right now and DeMarco could end up facing a really big fighter.

Rios should try extra hard to stay at 135 for as long as he can because he may not be able to dominate at 140 like he did at 135. The fighters are bigger at that weight and there are more talented fighters. One of Rios’ biggest advantages at 135 was his size, but that’ll disappear if he moves up in weight. He’ll just be one of many 5’8″ fighters and there would be nothing special about him.