By Rob Smith: A December 15th fight has been put together by Bob Arum of Top Rank for his fighter WBO super bantamweight champion Nonito Donaire (30-1, 19 KO’s) to defend his title against Mexican veteran Jorge Arce (61-6-2, 46 KO’s) in Houston, Texas. There had been talk of the fight not going through due to Arce asking for more money than Top Rank was willing to offer him, but Arum has somehow put the fight together.
There’s no word as of yet whether HBO will be televising the fight, but it’s highly likely that they’ll be showing it given the huge Mexican fan base in the United States that will probably be interested in seeing this fight. In terms of watch-ability, it’s not probably a poor fight beause it’s stacked heavily in Donaire’s favor just as his last mismatch against an over the hill Toshiaki Nishioka was. A fight between Arce and Donaire is really 5 years too late because Arce was exposed years ago by Cristian Mijares as nothing special. Arce has also been beaten along the way – quite easily – by Vic Darchinyan, one of Donaire’s knockout victims.
The Donaire-Arce fight is all about the fans that these two fighters have more than anything. They’ll likely watch it in high numbers on HBO, and Donaire’s fans will come off feeling good about seeing Donaire wipe out Arce, whereas Arce’s fans will wonder why they wasted their time in watching it. Hopefully, Arce’s fans aren’t going into this fight thinking he actually has a chance to win this because he doesn’t.
Arce doesn’t belong at super bantamweight, and is going to continue to have problems as long as he stays at this weight. Arce threatened recently that he’ll retire if he gets destroyed by Donaire in a one-sided fashion. That’s probably not going to happen because Arce can make good money in Mexico fighting little known opposition. Top Rank can use him again in the future when fans forget about how badly he’s going to lose this fight.