Rigondeaux faces Looknongyangtoy this Saturday in Macao, China

By Boxing News - 07/15/2014 - Comments

rigon13By Chris Williams: In what could be a sad end to his time with Top Rank, WBA/WBO super bantamweight champion Guillermo Rigondeaux (13-0, 8 KOs) will be defending his titles this Saturday night against 37-year-old Sod Looknongyangtoy (63-2-1, 28 KOs) in a fight that won’t be televised by HBO at the Cotai Arena, Venetian Resort, Macao, Macao S.A.R., China.

This is arguably a step down for Rigondeaux from the last mismatch he was setup with against Joseph Agbeko, and obviously not a great fight unless one-sided mismatches are of interest to you.

Rigondeaux’s contract is up with Top Rank, and there’s no word about whether Rigondeux will be re-signing with them. But if he’s not going to be matched against interesting opposition or have his fights televised on one of the major networks then it’s going to be a tough decision for him to make whether it makes sense to stay.

In the last few years, Rigondeaux has had one interesting fight and that was against Nonito Donaire, but after that nothing. He’s fought once since that time in beating Agbeko. That would have been a good fight had it taken place 4-6 years ago when Agebeko was in his prime, but it made no sense for Rigondeaux to have faced him last December.

Looknongyangtoy has had a career filled with fairly soft fights. He’s got a great record, but almost no solid wins amount the 63 victories on his resume. It’s hard to imagine someone compiling a record like that without any quality victories, but that’s what’s happened with Looknongyangtoy.

Rigondeaux was open to giving Donaire a chance to avenge his loss, but instead Donaire went in another direction in facing Vic Darchinyan and Simpiwe Vetyeka. Whether that was Donaire’s decision or Bob Arum’s not to have him fight Rigondeaux again is unknown. Donaire says that his management makes the decisions on who he fights, so I guess that means Arum made the decision not to let Donaire try and avenge his loss to Rigondeaux.

Also on the Rigondeaux- Looknongyangtoy card on Saturday is flyweight Brian Viloria facing Jose Alfredo Zuniga and Zou Shiming fighting Luis De la Rosa.

There’s not much of interest here other than the Rigondeaux fight, and that’s a mismatch. It’s unknown why Arum didn’t try and match Rigondeaux against someone like Scott Quigg, Carl Frampton, Leo Santa Cruz, Kiko Martinez or Victor Terrazas. Those would have been far more interesting opponents for Rigondeaux compared to the guy he’s facing on Saturday.



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