By Dan Ambrose: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum is interested in matching the winner of this Saturday’s fight between WBA Super World featherweight champion Nonito Donaire (33-2, 21 KOs) and Nicholas Walters (24-0, 20 KOs) against WBO featherweight champion Vasyl Lomachenko (2-1, 1 KOs).
This would be an excellent fight, but it would be awfully tough on Walters and Donaire, because neither of those guys are in the same league as Lomachenko in my view.
“Arum told me today he’d like to match Saturday’s Donaire-Walters winner with Lomachenko if V-Lom wins 11/22. LOVE IT! #boxing,” said Dan Rafael of ESPN.
Lomachenko will be fighting next month against #1 WBO Chonlatarn Piriyapinyo (52-1, 33 KOs) on November 22nd at the Cotai Arena, Venetian Resort, in Macao, Macao S.A.R., China. While Piriyapinyo has much more experience than Lomachenlo does as a pro and has a better record than him, it’s still a terrible mismatch. Piriyapinyo is a fighter with a badly inflated resume based on weak opposition instead of the quality fighters that Lomachenko has been fighting since he turned pro. Lomachenko will make easy work of Piriyapinyo.
It’s surprising that the 82-year-old Arum is willing to match the Donaire vs. Walters winning against Lomachenko, because in the past Arum has talked about wanting to let fights marinate by waiting until they’re as big as possible before he makes them. But in this case it doesn’t look like Arum wants to make the fight wait.
You can’t blame Arum for wanting to rush these fights, because if he doesn’t push Donaire or Walters in with Lomachenko then sooner or later someone will beat them, and then it’ll be too late for Arum to match them against Lomachenko.
The best way for Lomachenko to become a star is for him to beat the likes of Donaire of Walters, and then possibly Guillermo Rigondeaux. Ideally, Lomachenko needs to move up in weight to the super featherweight division and then later to lightweight for him to face the likes of Terence Crawford and Raymundo Beltran.
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