Jean-Marc Mormeck is 39 years old, five-foot-eleven and a puffed-up cruiserweight to boot.
Are these the kind of title defenses that will truly create a ?legacy? for Wladimir Klitschko?
Only if he doesn?t look good in the process. That?s the way the world works.
Is he entitled to a ?gimme? fight or two? Or three?
I guess that depends on whether you feel the multi-belt heavyweight champion deserves a breather (that?s not a typo; we didn?t mean ?brother?).
He probably does, since he most recently disposed of the would-be menace that is David Haye, in an atmosphere that does not have a lot of worthwhile challengers.
This next fight for him is set for December 10 in Germany, and it?s a good thing it?s there, because that is one of the few places it could possibly be sold.
Just so we?ve got everything in order, the titles that will be at stake are: the WBA Super World heavyweight title, the IBF and WBO heavyweight titles, and the IBO (International Boxing Organization) championship. Of course, all that hardware means more to the fighters than it does to anyone else.
Mormeck is 36-4 with 22 KO?s and has ?established? himself as a heavyweight with fights against Fres Oquendo and Timur Ibragimov. Those fights were very carefully placed in ?friendly? territory. The Ibragimov fight in particular may have been a bit of a robbery; Mormeck won a split decision, in a place (France) where an opponent coming from overseas (Ibragimov is from Uzbekistan, but lives in Florida) is behind the eight-ball from the beginning and has to basically knock someone out with a two-by-four to win a fight.
Another thing ? Mormeck was knocked out by Haye (in a cruiserweight title fight), which kind of takes away any of the suspense that might possibly exist in this upcoming matchup, even for those members of the media who would like nothing better than to shill for it.
The silly part of this whole thing is that anybody was even talking about Klitschko having a rematch with Haye, who dodged contact and pissed away his opportunity to really vault himself into the big time when he fought Klitschko on July 2.
Maybe his worthiness (or lack of same) provides a proper perspective for this encounter.
At the same time, Klitschko has done his best to sell the fight by saying that to seriously underestimate his foe could be ?a fatal mistake.?
