Gamboa-JuanMa: Collision Course Still Moving Parallel

By Jake Donovan

The race is on to which will actually occur by 2012: the end of the world, or a showdown between unbeaten featherweights Yuriorkis Gamboa and Juan Manuel Lopez.

Bob Arum is playing it as if rumors of the destruction of mankind as we know it couldn’t be further from the truth. The Hall of Fame promoter seems to be in as much of a hurry to bring to fruition the aforementioned matchup as he was a year ago – which is to say, not at all.

The promise around this time last year was that fans would just have to sit and wait until the undefeated duo cleaned out the featherweight division, establishing themselves not just as the best in the division but also as legitimate boxing superstars.

Only then will the collision course be deemed a big enough event for their promoter to pitch to the folks at the New Meadowlands Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. The vision for this showdown is a stadium event, not one that settles for a casino backdrop just for the sake of getting the two in the ring together.

If and when he pulls it off, Arum will have created even more space between himself and whoever is regarded as the next best active promoter in the sport today.

For the moment, the question isn’t so much when or if he pulls it off, but whether or not there really is a plan set in place for the two to first clean out the featherweight division.

Their next opponents have already been announced, neither of which will change the boxing landscape in the slightest – unless one (or both) of them happens to lose.

Gamboa (19-0, 15KO) is locked in for a March 26 date on HBO. The Cuban standout will face Jorge Solis of Guadalajara, Mexico in a 12-round bout at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City.

Solis (40-2-2-1NC, 25KO) is a former featherweight title challenger who now owns a paper belt four pounds north at junior lightweight. The Mexican has won three straight, all coming in a bounceback 2010 campaign that included an impressive decision win over Mario Santiago and a sixth round stoppage over previously unbeaten Francisco Cordero.

What he has accomplished in his recent past is certainly impressive. The only problem with it is that none of it has occurred at featherweight, which renders the fight largely irrelevant in regards to the master plan for Gamboa and Lopez to bump off the world’s best featherweights one fight at a time.

The truth is that Gamboa has yet to be afforded the opportunity to lend any validity to that claim. The 2004 Olympic Gold medalist has always fought an accelerated level since turning pro in 2007, but Top Rank – by its own admission – had every intention of slamming on the brakes from the moment he was brought to the company in October 2009.

The game plan at that time was to transition his fighting prime into his marketing prime so that the reward would catch up to the risk of facing him.

Four fights later, he still remains known only among the sport’s hardcore fans. One was a comparative-type fight, knocking out Rogers Mtagwa in less than two rounds, just three months after the divisional trialhorse took Lopez to hell and back in their 12-round war.

His most recent fight – a 12-round decision over Orlando Salido last September – served its purpose only in that Salido is a Top 10 featherweight and also possessed alphabet hardware. The fight itself did nothing to enhance Gamboa’s credentials, in fact drawing more criticism than praise, and the HBO telecast it headlined was among the network’s lowest rated boxing events of 2010.

The first two fights he had under the Top Rank banner came on undercards of shows headlined by Lopez, the right idea when the plan to eventually match the two together. But since then, not only have to the two inched any closer to a showdown, but they no longer even appear on the same network, never mind the same show.

Lopez (30-0. 27KO) is scheduled to return to the ring against Saildo on April 16, fighting for the third straight time on American cable network Showtime. His most recent appearance came in a thrilling shootout with former two-division champion Rafael Marquez until forcing the Mexican to quit due to injury after eight rounds.

Four months earlier, Lopez – a member of the 2004 Puerto Rican Olympic boxing squad – was seen climbing off of the canvas to thrice drop and stop Bernabe Concepcion in two rounds.

An argument can be made that Concepcion and Marquez belonged somewhere in – or perhaps just outside of – the division’s top ten, but certainly not high enough to be regarded as among the division’s elite.

Back when he faced Gamboa in September, Salido was a fixture in the featherweight Top 10. The loss knocked him back a few notches, which makes his April 16 fight with Lopez a comparison fight at best.

There still remain challenges against far more notable featherweights, including long-reigning undefeated titlist Chris John and once-beaten alphabet title claimant Elio Rojas, who was supposed to face Gamboa last September but was forced to withdraw due to injury.

As it stands, those fights don’t figure to pan out anytime soon, not unless Gamboa and Lopez plan to dump their belts sometime in the near future.

Otherwise, their future schedules – assuming both win their next respective fights – call for mandatory challengers and rematches.

If Gamboa gets past Solis, awaiting him will be another rising undefeated featherweight in Miguel Angel “Mikey” Garcia, who appears on the March 26 undercard against unbeaten but untested Matt Remillard. Should he survive that test, Gamboa would then have an alphabet obligation to rematch Jonathan Barros, whom he outpointed a year ago.

Assuming the odds hold true and Lopez beats Salido, awaiting the Puerto Rican southpaw are possible rematches with Marquez and mandatory challenger Daniel Ponce de Leon.

Such schedules all but guarantees that 2011 will not be the year in which boxing gets the one featherweight match it so badly craves and that 2012 provides little more than being forced to continue the game of wait-and-see.

More than a year ago, the undefeated featherweights were believed to be on a collision course. But in order to collide, two objects need to be moving towards one another.

In the past year and change – and presumably in the next several months to follow – we’ve witnessed two objects moving in the same direction, with no real promise of changing lanes anytime soon.