South Africa’s only world WBA featherweight champion Simphiwe “V12” Vetyeka will defend his title to Nonito Donaire in Macao, China on Saturday, 31 May 2014. Simphiwe, whose record stands at 26-2, 16 KO’s is little known to his countrymen due to the Television blackout that has been affecting South Africa for more than 3 years. This happened after a certain promoter took to courts a dispute that he had monopoly rights over television screening in his country.
Even in the absence on the television screens of South Africans, Boxing has managed to create world-class superstars in the likes of SimphiweVetyeka, Zolani Tete, Hekkie Budler,Thabo Sonjica, Thomas Oosthuizen, and Thabiso Mchunu. All these Boxers are on the top 10 ratings in their respective divisions even though their country’s public broadcaster does not show Boxing.
This coming Saturday will mark a two year old worldwide destruction of Featherweight contenders by Vetyeka, who beat both Chriss John and Daud CinoYordan in his last two fights for both the WBA and the IBO belts respectively. The fight with Nonito has however prompted Vetyeka to relinquish his IBO belt and only defend the WBA one. This was due to the IBO trying to force him to defend it against Nonito. He relinquished the belt. This has left two South Africans Macbute Sinyabi and Lusanda Komanisi to be the main contenders for that belt. This marks the 6th World title fight that Vetyeka has been involved in and 5 of them were in foreign countries. If that is anything to go by, Vetyeka is not bothered by where the fight is taking place. He takes care of business. Nonito Donaire aka The Filipino Flash 32-2, 21 KO’s is a former three division world champion. He will be fighting in China for the first time as he is based in USA, oceans away from his native Philippines.
Both Vetyeka and Donaire come from Knockout victories last year. Vetyeka is known for retiring Asian superstar Chris John in December last year. Vetyeka beat John into submission in round 6 while Nonito stopped a veteran Vic Darchinyan in round 9. Both pugilists only lost twice in their respective careers and on Saturday one of them will maintain his two loses and the other will have three. The fight is interestingly shown on HBO, depriving the South African audience of a very historic event, meanwhile South Africans have taken to social networks to protest about the TV blackout in a campaign called bring back our Boxing on television with hashtag #BringbackourBoxingonTV.
