By Steve Kim
The original plan from Top Rank called for former WBA lightweight titlist Brandon Rios and Yuriorkis Gamboa to co-headline an HBO televised doubleheader from the Home Depot Center in Carson, California, as a possible prelude to a showdown between the two later in the year. But as Johnny Molina and his promoter, Dan Goossen, battled each other. “Bam Bam” was left without a dance partner as March 3rd loomed. Eventually, the decision was made to focus on Rios-Gamboa next and move the date to April 14th to the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.
As deadlines loomed last week, Todd duBoef, President of Top Rank, was dispatched to Miami, Florida to close the deal with Gamboa’s co-promoter, Ahmet Oner. If he wasn’t successful, for the time being, Rios and Gamboa would just go their separate ways.
duBoef closed like Mariano Rivera while in South Beach.
“A lot of it is education and explaining to them the climate and the understanding of the big fight and putting a big match like this together and working closely with our co-promoter and working out the details,” explained duBoef on Friday afternoon, after he returned to Las Vegas earlier that morning. When asked if he ever considered pulling the plug on this fight, he responded, “Well, I hate to say you had to give up but obviously, we were running up against a short window. Again, on a timeline to do effective promotion, for a fight like that one, you really wanted to pull the trigger a lot earlier.”
This is a face-off that is heavily anticipated amongst hardcore boxing aficionados. You have the hard-hitting, rugged Rios against the talented, speedy Gamboa, who is taking quite the risk in moving up to 135 pounds for this contest. But putting together fights of this nature can be difficult. While it’s one thing to play fantasy boxing, in order for bouts like this to become a reality, the needs of the promoters, the demands of the fighters and the expectations of the network (in this case, HBO) all have to intersect and come together. It helped that both boxers are under the Top Rank banner and that HBO yearned for this contest.
Read More: MaxBoxing.com
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