By Chris Williams: Not much happened at the final press conference between WBO super bantamweight champion Nonito Donaire and WBA champion Guillermo Rigondeaux in terms of back and forth trash talking. Both fighters said mostly calm and harmless comments about their unification fight this Saturday night on HBO at the Radio City Music Hall in New York, New York.
The only real interesting part of the press conference involved the final stare down between Donaire and Rigondeaux. Donaire couldn’t take his eyes off of Rigondeaux and looked to be trying his hardest to look mean to get some kind of message across to the Cuban two-time former Olympic Gold medalist.
It didn’t seem to work because Rigondeaux stayed cool and calm the entire time and he even looked amused at the way that Donaire was making facial expressions by knitting his brow as if he was anger. It looked like Donaire was hoping to scare Rigondeaux in order to get a psychological that would help him on Saturday. That has got to be the longest stare down I’ve ever seen before and the most pointless. Donaire must be really worried to stare at Rigondeaux for that long.
It wasn’t working because Rigondeaux is beyond being scared by fighters giving him dirty looks the way Donaire was. That kind of thing only works on mentally fragile fighters, and Rigondeaux is far from that. If he weren’t he would have never won two gold medals, four hundred amateur fights and the WBA World super bantamweight title.
As far quotes go, Donaire said “I guaranteed you coming into the fight you’ll see the best of Nonito Donaire.”
Rigondeaux said “I don’t talk much. I don’t say a lot of things…Come Saturday, I’m ready…I’ll become a world champion again and unify the titles.”
I have a feeling that we won’t be seeing the best of Donaire because Rigondeaux won’t let him. I think once he lands a hard body shot this fight could be over very quickly. If Donaire sees that as the best of Donaire, then I agree with him. He’ll give it a great shot and go out on his shield, but I don’t see Donaire being able to do with Rigondeaux what he’s done against the old codgers that his promoter Bob Arum has been putting in with him recently or the lesser fighters that Arum has dug up for Donaire.
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