By Jim Dower: WBO super bantamweight champion Nonito Donaire (31-2, 20 KO’s), the 2012 Fighter of the Year, finally met his match in WBA World super bantamweight champion Guillermo Rigondeaux (12-0, 8 KO’s) tonight in Donaire losing his WBO title by a 12 round unanimous decision by the scores of 114-113, 116-111.
HBO unofficial scorer Harold Lederman scored the fight 118-109 for Rigondeaux, and I personally scored it 117-110 for Rigondeaux. Donaire had one good round in the 10th when he knocked Rigondeaux down, but he didn’t hurt him.
Rigondeaux got back up and continued to put on a boxing clinic in beating Donaire to the punch with his much faster hands, and paying him back each time Donaire would land anything. Donaire paid for every shot he landed in the fight because he was either countered immediately by Rigondeaux or he’d get tagged with two or three hard shots moments later.
A small band of writers had Rigondeaux barely winning the fight, but the boxing public en masse had Rigondeaux winning by a lopsided decision. There wasn’t much action in any of the rounds because both guys were counter punchers and were waiting for the other fighter to lead. Of the action that did take place, Rigondeaux got the better of it in every round, even in the round he was knocked down in.
If you were to pick a round where the fight was lost for Donaire you’d have to say it was in the 1st round when Rigondeaux clipped him with a hard left hand that knocked Donaire back several feet.
Before that, Donaire had tried to walk Rigondeaux down like he’d done against his 2012 victims, but it didn’t work like it had against those fighters because Rigondeaux was too fast of hand and foot and he kept making Donaire pay by hitting him with shots that would stop him in his tracks and make him second guess any move that he made offensively.
Other boxing results on tonight’s card from New York:
Toka Kahn Clary TKO 1 Gadiel Andaluz
Felix Verdejo TKO 1 Steve Gutierrez
Mikael Zewski KO 2 Daniel Sostre
Tyler Canning SD 4 Dario Soccia
Erick De Leon US 4 Diamond Baier
Glen Tapia UD 8 Joseph de los Santos
Jesse Hart TKO 3 Marlon Farr
Sean Monaghan TKO 1 Dion Stanley
Comments are closed.