Josh Taylor is now one of five or six men — depending on your interpretation of the Teofimo Lopez situation — to become undisputed champion of a division in the four-belt era, beating Jose Ramirez by decision on Saturday night to become the one true king at 140 lbs.
Even with small sample size, undisputed reigns in the four-belt (WBC, WBA, IBF, WBO) era are not just uncommon, but they’re almost never long-lasting, either because fighters have done all they are going to do in that division, or sanctioning body politics get in the way sooner than later.
Look at the reigns:
Though it’s generally accepted that the “four-belt era” begins in 2007, with full major recognition for the WBO at that point, the WBO was founded in 1988. Bernard Hopkins fully unified the middleweight division in 2001, and Hopkins is the outlier, making six defense defenses of all four belts. He lost the crown via controversial decision against Jermain Taylor in July 2005. Taking over for Hopkins, Taylor never did defend the full crown. Because he chose to fight a desired rematch with Hopkins instead of IBF mandatory challenger Arthur Abraham, Taylor was stripped of the IBF belt. Terence Crawford won the full 140 lb crown in Aug. 2017, beating Julius Indongo to put all four belts together. Crawford made no defenses, moving up to welterweight, and had vacated the IBF title less than two weeks after the full unification, anyway, because he was not going to be able to meet the timeframe demand to fight a mandatory challenger. Oleksandr Usyk was the man at cruiserweight from July 2018 through March 2019, when he officially vacated all titles to move up to heavyweight. He made one title defense, in late 2018 against Tony Bellew. If you choose to count Teofimo Lopez — and I know it seems like I really care about this, but I honestly don’t, it’s just a uniquely weird and dumb situation even for boxing titles — he’s made no defenses of the belts he unified last year against Vasiliy Lomachenko, but will do so on June 19 against George Kambosos Jr. Whether Lopez plans to stay around much longer at 135 has been discussed a lot, and there’s a good chance he moves up by the end of 2021 or sometime in 2022. Still, none of this is meant to degrade Taylor’s achievement, and in all reality, that’s how boxing fans should always look at someone going after an undisputed claim in modern times: Achievement. Because of the several ridiculous ways the sport operates, there’s not much can be done about what comes after someone unifies all four belts, but the doing it is still impressive and worthy of note.
Taylor has choices, of course. He may not be some huge money superstar, but he’s a legitimate top fighter in the sport and has earned his recognition. Let’s look at the two key options and what goes around them.
Stay at 140 Let’s say Taylor stays at 140 for the time being. There is then another quick set of two options:
Try as best he can to remain undisputed champion. Probably vacate at least one belt so he can make the biggest possible fights at the weight. There is an immediate, looming mandatory that has to be dealt with: Jack Catterall, who has been sitting on a WBO mandatory for some time now — he was named mandatory back when Maurice Hooker still held the belt, and Hooker lost it to Ramirez in 2019. He would have been forced in against Ramirez last year (or Ramirez would have had to vacate), but Ramirez also had a WBC mandatory (Viktor Postol) who took precedence, and then everyone agreed to allow Ramirez-Taylor to happen.
But the 27-year-old Catterall (26-0, 13 KO) will be getting the order for a fight with Taylor now. If Taylor vacates all four belts, Catterall will fight someone else for that vacant title. If Taylor just vacates the one belt, his undisputed claim ends anyway.
There is some appeal in Taylor-Catterall. While Catterall would not be seen as a truly dangerous threat to Taylor, it could be a chance for Taylor to take a “victory lap” sort of fight at home in Scotland against an English opponent. If the UK can get crowds into venues this summer or fall, they could do a great homecoming style show for Taylor in Glasgow or Edinburgh.
But if Taylor is looking for another actually big fight immediately, Catterall probably doesn’t scratch that itch.
Otherwise for current 140 fighters, the top options would be rematches with Ramirez or Regis Prograis, whom Taylor beat in 2019 to win the World Boxing Super Series. Both were really good fights, but I don’t know that there’s any overwhelming demand to see either of them again, and neither Ramirez nor Prograis are exactly big stars who truly move the needle. Taylor may see both of them as “been there, done that” territory, at least for the time being.
The most intriguing potential option at 140 would be lightweight top dog Teofimo Lopez moving up in weight.
