To cap off my week long assault against the world sanctioning organizations, especially the World Boxing Organization, I have elected to surrender. Others, like ESPN’s Dan Rafael, have also railed against them recently and I’m sure we all feel good afterwards; however, no writer can fix the current state of boxing. Only fighters can.
As such, I have decided to fully endorse The Ring’s lineal championship scheme and to let go of my boxing purist nature by also accepting the catch weight. My reasoning is simple–titles and rankings mean absolutely nothing in boxing anymore and they haven’t for some time.
For instance, there are the heavyweight brothers who will never fight each other and they own three of the four recognized belts. There is a middleweight champion who claims to be better than everybody, even the fighters in Showtime’s super middleweight tournament, yet he won’t fight anyone until the money is right or the infection heals–I forget which excuse is the most recent.
The other middleweight champion is best known for losing to Oscar De La Hoya than accomplishing anything substantive, and the WBA welterweight champion has apparently elected to self-impose the Antonio Margarito one-year suspension. Additionally, a significant number of champions and contenders in other weight divisions are relative unknowns to most of the civilized world.
Meanwhile, the number one fighter in boxing, Manny Pacquiao, is not a champion of any world sanctioning organization. He is the champion of boxing itself. The number 3 pound-for-pound fighter, Bernard Hopkins, owns no titles. Israel Vazquez and Rafael Marquez collectively own zero belts. Paul Williams? None. Do we think less of them and what they have accomplished because they are introduced these days as former champions? I hope not.
Don’t get me wrong, there are fantastic fighters with title belts; however, the titles do not define their greatness. Juan Manuel Lopez, Juan Manuel Marquez, Edwin Valero, Nonito Donaire, Timothy Bradley, and Miguel Cotto all own a piece of the championship in their respective weight division and all of them were great without it.
To become a boxing champion today means that guys like Kelly Pavlik, WBC/WBO middleweight champion, have to fight mandatory opponents like Marco Antonio Rubio and Gary Lockett. Both fights were legitimate title defenses, but they were also perfect displays of a champion versus club fighters. Neither fight was a big draw, which is to say that Pavlik has made the overwhelming chunk of his net worth from Jermain Taylor I, Taylor II (catch weight), and Bernard Hopkins (catch weight). The bottom line being that the WBC and /WBO are bad for Pavlik’s business–financial or otherwise.
Whether it is Pavlik or any other “champion,” the reality is that they have a limited number of fights before the downward slope to retirement begins to set in. Manny Pacquiao will be shooting for his seventh title in as many weight divisions in November. Is this really what we will remember or will it be that he defeated all of Mexico, De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton, and perhaps even Cotto, Floyd Mayweather, Jr., and Shane Mosley? Exactly, we will remember his victories and not the color or number of belts that he brought into the ring. We don’t want Manny dealing with the Rubios and Locketts from welterweight on down. We want him to fight the best opponents without being subjected to the rules of silly world sanctioning organizations. If he defeats Cotto, do you really see him defending the WBO welterweight belt against Antonin Decaire, Rafal Jackiewicz, or Krzysztof Bienias? Me either.
My advice is for fighters to disengage from the prehistoric paradigm that the title matters and to quit marching to the drums of “world” this and “international” that. Instead, fighters need to be measured by the level of opposition and Ben Franklins than the bling brought to the ring. It’s painful to come to this conclusion, but willful blindness to what the alphabet soup is doing to the sport is no longer acceptable.
In other words, fighters and promoters should adopt the Freddie Roach model of legacy development whereby title belts are glittery prizes to be won, but title defenses are optional. In essence, take the biggest draws in the sport and let them snipe opponents at catch weights. Let the fighters write their own legacy without having the WBA, WBO, IBF, or WBC write it for them. It doesn’t take the biggest draw in boxing to make this work. It also doesn’t work for the heavyweights, so I will still stand by my opinion that heavyweight greats are belt unifiers. The alphabet soup organizations have relaxed rules for the big boys anyway, so unification is not too much to ask.
“Organized” boxing started on its slippery slope when world sanctioning organizations began to reproduce more frequently than the Octomom. There are too many titles, too many weight divisions, and not enough badass versus badass. As such, I trust The Ring (barely) more than the alphabet soup to rank fighters and declare true champions. I say this because of its commitment to lineage. The reason why The Ring only has 6 champions out of 17 weight classes is that the politics of boxing today disrespects the sport’s past. Lineage is broken.
This whole thing comes down to the lesser of two evils. I am sick of the stranglehold and the politics. Catch weights are my new friends, and The Ring will now tell me who the true champions are in boxing. As for the WBO, WBA, IBF, and WBC, I have reclassified them to the status of the World Boxing Union–unrecognized.
