WBC Silver lightweight champion Antonio DeMarco (25-2-1, 18KOs) will face off against popular Venezuelan Jorge Linares (31-1, 20KOs) for the vacant WBC lightweight title on Saturday, October 15th. In the main event, Bernard Hopkins will face off against Chad Dawson. The fight card will be broadcast live on HBO PPV.

The semi-main event twelve rounder will mark the second time that DeMarco challenges for the full-fledged green and gold belt. In his first opportunity, DeMarco of Tijuana by way of Los Mochis, Mexico, came up short against the late Edwin Valero in Monterey, Mexico, in early 2010.

“That experience helped me a lot. That was a fight, like I have said before, that wouldn’t change for anything,” the soft but well-spoken DeMarco recently stated. “It is like if I went from elementary school to junior high school in that fight. That was as fight that I learned much from and this is how the sport is.”

Since that loss, DeMarco has gotten back on the winning track, stopping title challenger Daniel Attah in two and then earning a unanimous decision over Mexican Reyes Sanchez to capture the Silver belt once again. Despite the wins, DeMarco says that the losses are the real lessons, “You win and you lose and you must learn from your losses. My losses and the errors I have made in my life is what have made me who I am.”

If the Valero loss was if going from the sixth to the seventh grade, DeMarco does not feel a win over Linares and in turn capturing the title is like receiving a degree, “No, not at all. In this sport, you never graduate. You never stop learning. That is the difference. One needs to keep learning more and more. We know that if we win, bigger and better things will come and much tougher tests. We must be able to give even more of us.”