Golden Boy adding new monthly prospect series

Golden Boy and DAZN are partnering on a new monthly boxing series that will air on regional cable affiliates in the United States, offering two hours of live fights and a one-hour studio show featuring Ring Magazine writers.

To make this clear: the series will not be airing on DAZN. They have not yet announced their cable affiliates, but that is said to be coming shortly.

Anyway, the series is supposedly going to feature “top prospects and rising contenders,” but take that with a grain of salt. The first event is set for March 21 from The Avalon in Hollywood, and the main event is a 10-round lightweight fight between Mercito Gesta (32-2-2, 17 KO) and Juan Antonio Rodriguez (29-7, 25 KO).

Gesta is 31 years old and neither a prospect nor a rising contender. He’s had a couple world title shots, one in 2012 and one in 2018, and was exposed pretty clearly by Miguel Vazquez and Jorge Linares. And the 31-year-old Rodriguez’s W-L record probably tells you what you need to know; he’s also lost step-up fights in the past to the likes of Billy Dib, Javier Fortuna, and Jezreel Corrales. In his last outing, he lost to Pedro Campa, and that was June 2017, which is his only fight in the last three years.

So more likely than this being a ShoBox-style program, it’s probably just going to be another series like the many that Golden Boy and other promoters have run on regional cable affiliates over the years, featuring fights of varying quality, and to be fair, the March 21 co-feature is a prospect matchup, pitting Ferdinand Kerobyan (11-0, 6 KO) against Blair Cobbs (9-0-1, 6 KO) in an eight-round fight.

The dates for the series are set for the rest of 2019: March 21, April 25, May 16, June 13, July 18, August 22, September 26, October 24, November 14, and December 5.