Donaire-Martinez is off

Ronnie Nathanielsz reports that Cameron Dunkin, the manager of Nonito Donaire, has pulled his fighter from the again-rescheduled Top Rank PPV at the famous Araneta Coliseum that had just been moved to April 18.

I said yesterday that it made zero sense to try to market a U.S. PPV on March 21 with Roy Jones fighting Omar Sheika that night, but there's no mention of that. There is much talk of the trouble coming from trying to fill Filipino PPV theaters with Manny Pacquiao's May 2 fight with Ricky Hatton and Gerry Penalosa's April 25 fight against Juan Manuel Lopez both scheduled within two weeks of the latest Donaire date. There's apparently just no advertising money left over to promote this fight with the other two so close, and with bigger stars.

This continues the fizzling out of Nonito Donaire's career momentum. He now has to prove something again, which is kind of absurd, but he's fallen by the wayside. His most famous victim, Vic Darchinyan, has lapped him in the "hot" category by emerging as one of the best P4P fighters in boxing with his jump up to 115 pounds, where he's been dominant. It's almost as if Donaire never beat Darchinyan at this point. And moving from Shaw to Top Rank has not gotten Nonito more active, which was the whole point.