By Dan Ambrose: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum was less than impressed with the manner that WBA super bantamweight champion Guillermo Rigondeaux (12-0, 8 KO’s) unseated his much more popular fighter in WBO super bantamweight champion Nonito Donaire (31-2, 20 KO’s) last night in beating him by a 12 round unanimous decision in a fight that was frequently booed by the large pro-Donaire crowd from start to finish.
Arum would have liked to have seen more action from Rigondeaux because he recognizes that’s what the boxing public wants to see from their fighters.
Arum said to Yahoo Sports about Rigondeaux: “I’m 81-years-old and I’m probably going to have to do the best promoting job I’ve ever done…It was not a very engaging fight. When Rigondeaux stands and fights, the ***** has a lot of power and a lot of skill, but the running the way he does really makes it not a watchable fight. I had Donaire up by one point heading into the 11th.”
I don’t agree with Arum. If Donaire fought exactly like Rigondeaux does now, he’d likely be even more popular to his Filipino fans than he currently is. It’s not that Rigondeaux isn’t an exciting fighter; it’s that he doesn’t have a built in fan base like Donaire that will back him and make Arum’s job easier to promote him.
If Donaire could fight like Rigondeaux, I’m pretty sure that Donaire’s fans would see him as another Floyd Mayweather Jr. and he’d be getting huge praise today if he were to have fought like Rigondeaux did last night. I don’t think for a second Arum would be criticizing Donaire’s performance either, wondering how he’s going to promote him or saying he had him losing the fight going into the 11th.
I think Arum would be very, very happy with Donaire’s performance last night because Donaire’s fans would have been happy. The wrong guy won last night and that obviously has Arum wondering how he’s going to be able to sell Rigondeaux to the U.S fans when he doesn’t have the built in fan base of Filipino fans for him.
It’s not as if Arum can take Rigondeaux to Macao, China and market his fights to the wide Chinese audience and the brag about how 200 million watched him fight. Last night, Rigondeaux would have boxed circles around the Chinese fighter Zou Shiming that Arum is heavily marketing to China and the United States, but Rigondeaux doesn’t have the potential to have his fights sold to a huge Asian market the way that Shiming and Donaire does.
I had Rigondeaux up 97-92 going into the 11th round, and I thought Donaire clearly lost the last two rounds and should have lost the fight by the scores 117-110. I gave Donaire the 2nd and the 10th rounds, but that was the only rounds where he fought well enough to win them in my view. In the other rounds, Rigondeaux was not only out-landing Donaire but landing the cleaner shots.
Arum might have been influenced by Donaire’s aggressiveness and ignored the fact that it wasn’t effective aggression. You don’t give rounds to fighters that are walking forward and missing punches the way that Donaire was and I don’t see how Arum could have had Donaire ahead going into the 11th unless he was counting Donaire’s missed punches as being enough for him to win the rounds.
I don’t see any problem with Arum being able to market Rigondeaux’s fights. He’s probably not going to be a star like Donaire or Manny Pacquiao because he doesn’t have the automatic built in fan base of Filipino fans that will back him in huge, huge numbers.
The best thing that Arum can do is try and have Rigondeaux move up a class to fight his unbeaten featherweight star Mikey Garcia, but after last night I have a feeling that Arum won’t make that move because Rigondeaux is much faster than Mikey and it would likely be a replay of last night. Garcia mostly just throws one punch at a time like Donaire and he loads up with everything he throws. Rigondeaux does well against those types of fighters and Arum won’t want another one of his stars exposed.
The best thing that Arum can do with Rigondeaux is have him defend his two titles against the top guys at super bantamweight like Carl Frampton, Scott Quigg and Victor Terrazaz, and realize that Rigondeaux probably won’t ever be a big money fighter like Donaire. It’s not that he’s not exciting it’s that he doesn’t have that built in fan base like Donaire does.
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