The December 18 fight between the world’s top two light-heavyweights, Antonio Tarver and Glen Johnson (not necessarily in that order) will determine who had succeeded the legendary Roy Jones, JR. These are the only two guys who scored knockout victories over the once unbeatable Jones.
Ironically, none of the sanctioning bodies will recognize the winner as a champion. Even now, Antonio and Glen are ex-title holders. The WBC stripped Tarver of his title for refusing to fight its mandatory challenger. The IBF did the same to Johnson for the same reason.
The winner will be acclaimed as the world champion of the 175 pound division. By whom? The people who know boxing of course!
Gone is the day when only one fighter is universally recognized as world champion. Now, you have two, three or even four fighters who claim to be the true champion of a division. The only exception at this time, but not for long, is middleweight Bernard Hopkins.
Unification fights may solve the problem for a time being. Since the sanctioning bodies have different fighters as mandatory challengers, a “unified champion” will have to surrender one or two of his belts as he could not possibly fight two or three mandatory challengers within a very short span of time. When he surrenders or is stripped of his title or titles, multiple champions in a division occurs.
One sanctioning body even introduced the so called super champion. This seems to have contributed further to the confusion.
A couple of years back, Marco Antonio Barrera surrendered the WBC featherweight title he won from Erik Morales in their second fight. Although he was without a sanctioning bodies title, Barrera was universally recognized as the “People’s Champion”, the true top guy in the featherweight division. After successfully defending this “title” against Johnny Tapia and Kevin Kelly, Barrera yielded this universal recognition to Manny Pacquiao late last year.
Either Tarver or Johnson will join the Pac-Man as a Peoples’ Champion after their December 18 fight. While none of the major sanctioning bodies are recognizing the winner as its champion, the majority of the boxing fans worldwide will.
The question then would be. Whose recognition matters?
When many more Pacquiao’s and Tarver’s – Johnson’s would follow the trail first walked by Barrera, the sanctioning bodies would slowly, but surely become irrelevant. Wouldn’t they?
