WBA Super World featherweight champion Nonito “The Filipino Flash” Donaire (33-2, 21 KOs) has decided not to give former WBA champ Simpiwe Vetyeka an immediate rematch like he was talking about after having beaten him by a 5th round technical decision last May to win the WBA title.
Donaire instead will be fighting WBA regular featherweight champ Nicholas “Axe Man” Walters (24-0, 20 KOs) on October 18th at the StubHub Center in Carson, California. The Donaire-Walters fight will be the televised co-feature on HBO on the undercard of the Gennady Golovkin vs. Marco Antonio Rubio fight card.
Both Donaire and Walters are promoted by Top Rank, while the fight card is K2 Promotions card. There weren’t any TV dates free for Donaire and Walters to fight this year, so this was the best option for them.
“They are Top Rank fighters, but we wanted to make the best fight possible even if it didn’t involve our fighters,” said Tom Loeffler of K2 Promotions to Dan Rafael of ESPN.com. “The fight adds a lot of value to Gennady’s fight with Rubio.”
Walters isn’t well known, but Donaire is, and it’s somewhat interesting fight. It’s nowhere near as good as Donaire vs. Vasyl Lomachenko, but it’s unclear whether Top Rank promoter Bob Arum will ever make the fight. Donaire is a proven money maker and he has a large fan base.
If Arum were to feed Donaire to Lomachenko, it would likely result in the arguably far less popular Lomachenko making easy work of Donaire much in the same way Guillermo Rigondeaux did last year when he dominated him in winning a 12 round decision.
Walters has good punching power, as we saw with his recent stoppage win over Vic Darchinyan. If Donaire isn’t able to score a knockout in this fight, we could see Donaire take another beating like the one he took against Rigondeaux.
Donaire has lost a lot of the speed and quickness that he had years ago. He still has his big punching power, but the flash part of his game is gone. He’s now forced to stand and trade with his opponents more and more.
