By Ryan Burton
On November 26th, WBO super featherweight prospect Vasyl Lomachenko (6-1, 4KOs) will return to the ring against undefeated former featherweight champion Nicholas Walters (26-0-1) at the Cosmopolitan Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. HBO will televise the highly anticipated bout.
BoxingScene.com and other members of the media recently spoke with Top Rank CEO Bob Arum to discuss the fight and the Hall of Fame promoter revealed that they were in negotiations to match Jezreel Corrales (20-1, 8KOs) against Lomachenko before Walters agreed to the fight.
Corrales pulled off one of the bigger upsets of the year when he traveled to Japan in April and scored a two round knockout of heavily favored and undefeated Takashi Uchiyama to capture the WBA super featherweight world title. Uchiyama went down three times before the fight was waved off.
Now a rematch has been set, once again in Japan, on December 31. If Corrales is successful in defeating Uchiyama for a second time, Arum will revisit making the fight and wants to stage it in early 2017.
Corrales is the WBA's "super" champion at the weight. Jason Sosa, who knocked out Javier Fortuna a few months ago, holds the WBA's "regular" title at the weight.
"Yes, as a matter of fact we were about ready to have Lomachenko fight Corrales when Nicholas Walters agreed to term and that goes back some time so we decided to do the Nicholas Walters fight. Corrales is a heck of a fighter and I think we would like to do the winner of Lomachenko-Walters to fight him sometime early next year," said Arum.
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