LAS VEGAS- Father Time simply caught up to Nonito Donaire. This, as Mexican Alex Santiago dominated him for 12 rounds to win the vacant WBC bantamweight championship Saturday night in Las Vegas on the undercard of Errol Spence-Terrance Crawford Showtime/PBC main event.
The officials scores were 115-113 and 116-112 x 2 for the 27 year old Santiago in this one, The Big Fight weekend card was wider at 117-111 for the new champ.
After some early “feeling out” in the first round, Santiago was the aggressor the rest of the way. Donaire’s best moment came early in the fight, when he shook Santiago with a left hand and followed up with a good combination. However, he could not build on that, much less, knock Santiago down as the round went on.
From there on Santiago got off first, repeatedly scoring with combination after combination, especially at the end of rounds. He battered the multi-division champion, Filipino star Donaire along the ropes with a five-punch combination to punctuate the end of the seventh stanza.
It was apparent that Donaire at 40 years of age simply could not get punches off quick enough to do any sustained damage to Santiago in the latter rounds. The Mexican continued to score with combinations down the stretch for the easy win.
“It’s so hard to explain this moment right now, all the work we put in for just this moment. It’s just great to win this title” Santiago said through tears in the ring. “It’s been an honor to fight such a legend in Nonito Donaire. We’ve been very focused in training camp and trying to find the errors Nonito was showing and that’s what we capitalized on tonight.”
Donaire, now 42-7, was bidding to break his own world championship record and become the oldest bantamweight champion ever, again, this time at 40. he previously had won the title for a second time as a 38 year old, but lost it in a rematch to Naoya “The Monster” Inoue in June of last year. Inoue destroyed Donaire in the second round for a KO after the two had fought a fantastic 12 round battle won by the Japanese sensatioin in their first fight one at the end of 2019.
Santiago, now 28-3-5, has now won four fights in a row, since losing to Gary Antonio Russell and definitely opens up the possibility of bigger opponents and paydays in the bantamweight division. This after Inoue having vacated all the 118 lb. belts and moved up to super bantamweight. That’s where Inoue beat American Stephen Fulton for his two world titles last week.
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