As you probably already know, there was a press conference today in Miami involving Brandon Rios and Yuriorkis Gamboa. However, Gamboa did not show up to the press conference leading to a ton of rumors surrounding his status as a Top Rank fighter. It seems that the growing sentiment amongst the boxing experts is that this no-show means that the Gamboa-Rios fight is off and Top Rank needs to find a replacement. Early rumors are pointed at Richard Abril as the top choice, because he is available and he got into a little fight with Brandon Rios at the press conference.
As a warning, Brandon Rios uses a ton of profanity in this video, so be prepared for that. Also, I am not fluent in Spanish, so I have no idea what's going on in half of this video. Hopefully one of our Spanish-speaking posters (cough Apprentice cough) can help with getting a loose translation of what is going on.
A couple of interesting things caught my eye in this video. First of all, when Richard Abril starts talking to Brandon Rios, Rios says to him "You want to fight me, you got to talk to [my manager]." To me, it seems that Brandon know that he isn't going to fight Gamboa and he is trying to drum up interest in Richard Abril. What's the best way to introduce Richard Abril to the world? By having him ‘fight' Rios at the press conference. To me, this whole thing seems to be completely staged. I'm not sure if it was at Arum's behest, like the business between Dereck Chisora and Frank Warren, but the whole thing seems a little convenient for Top Rank. Do you guys think that this fight was real or did it look staged?