The elite Cuban has been added to the Jan 13th PBC on FS1 card.
Two time Olympic gold medalist and former super bantamweight titleholder Guillermo Rigondeaux (17-1, 11 KOs) will be returning to action in less than two weeks on the preliminary portion of Premier Boxing Champion’s upcoming Fox Sports 1 card on the 13th. The show is headlined by an IBF super middleweight title fight between Jose Uzcategui and Caleb Plant.
“Rigo” was last seen at the tail end of 2017 when things didn’t go well for him for the first time in his professional boxing career. The move up in weight to meet fellow all time great amateur and current pound for pound king Vasyl Lomachenko was poorly calculated to say the least. The Cuban defector found himself giving up serious size and youth without anywhere near the normally gargantuan skill advantage that he was accustomed to having. The result was Rigondeaux retiring after six rounds of one sided action going against him by citing a hand injury that may or may not of actually existed.
What has since been forgotten, and arguably was forgotten even before that fight, was just how great Guillermo Rigondeaux was in the ring. There was a time when top fighters like Nonito Donaire were utterly helpless in there with him. No one had ever been evenly remotely competitive for more than the briefest moment until the Lomachenko debacle. Yet despite this, the networks had abandoned him anyway due to the lack of entertainment value in his comfortable, safety first points wins. Being signed with the entirely inept Roc Nation Sports didn’t help.
Rigo will have many options and dates available to him under Premier Boxing Champions banners back down at super bantamweight. He is 38 now though. That is a high number for any weight class, but even more so for the smaller weight classes where fighters consistently age less gracefully. Opponent Giovanni Delgado (16-8, 9 KOs) is unlikely to be good enough for us to learn if Rigondeaux has slipped or not, but that sort of matchmaking is understandable giving the long layoff and result of the Loma fight.
That was a result, by the way, that I do think the Cuban has been unfairly maligned for whether he quit or not. Rigondeaux has never struggled to make super bantamweight. It isn’t inconceivable that he could have dropped to 118 lbs when he was a bit younger even. Vasyl Lomachenko is currently the best 135 lb fighter on the planet and is clearly one of the greatest talents to ever grace the sport. I know there is a bit of hindsight at play here, but looking back what the hell else could have realistically happened in that fight?
