By Steve Kim
Roman 'Chocolatito' Gonzalez (46-0, 38KOs) ended 2016 by making history in becoming the first Nicaraguan fighter to ever capture titles in four weight classes by out-pointing the tough Carlos Caudras over twelve rounds at the Forum in Los Angeles on September 10th.
And there's a good chance we could be seeing a rematch of that pitched battle in 2017.
"That is definitely true," confirmed Gonzalez's manager, Carlos Blandon, to BoxingScene.com. "We don't know when, right now. We're not focused on any dates, we're just focused on training. We want to be ready for whoever is the next rival. We do not have a rival, we do not have a date, we do have a lot of anxiety to fight."
Recently, Gonzalez was dealt a blow with the sudden and unexpected passing of his long-time coach, Arnulfo Obando in November.
"We're going to use this hard moment we're going through as a motivation. We're going to dedicate the next fight to Arnulfo and that's where we're going to go,"said Blandon, who says that in the upcoming year that they would like to go big game hunting to build upon 'Chocolatito's impressive credentials.
"We're happy at 115, we're happy we won that fight, we're happy to know that there's a lot of other names apart from Caudras, like (Naoya) Inoue, (Juan Francisco) 'Gallo' Estrada and I know those are really good fights. So that's where we're at, right now,"stated Blandon.
The hope is that Gonzalez is back in the ring by at least March.
"Yes definitely,"said Blandon, who added,"the latest is March. We want to have three fights this year, instead of the two we had last year. So we definitely have like an internal team deadline in terms of fighting in March, the first fight, in order to pull off three fights throughout the year."
Steve Kim is the news editor for BoxingScene.com.
