Competition seems like an afterthought to Showtime this year. Twenty-nine fights have taken place on ?Showtime Championship Boxing? and Showtime Pay-Per-View in 2014 and the favorite has won 28 times, a remarkable statistic that would certainly raise eyebrows in almost any other sport. The outlier bout was a last-minute substitute job featuring Sergio Thompson ? affiliated with Golden Boy Promotions ? outpointing Ricardo Alvarez (except for Vasyl Lomachenko ? a Top Rank client who popped up on Showtime because of a purse bid ? all of the winners have been Golden Boy/Al Haymon fighters).
However, that might change on Saturday night with a tripleheader from the StubHub Center in Carson, California. Omar Figueroa (defending his lightweight trinket against competent Daniel Estrada) usually makes for action fights but Sakio Bika-Anthony Dirrell II is a rematch of 36 forgettable minutes that took place last year. In the main event, however, Shawn Porter defends his USDA welterweight title against perennial U.K. hopeful Kell Brook.
Brook is the boxing equivalent of a 28-year-old debutante. Nearly 10 years after he turned professional, ?Special K? is finally getting his shot at The Big Time. Injuries and politics may have held Brook back a bit but he also had the (dis) advantage of being a draw in Sheffield and a staple of Sky Television, which made it easier for his handlers to keep him at the domestic level. After a decade as a prospect or a fringe contender, Brook has managed signature wins over Vyacheslav Senchenko, Rafal Jackiewicz, Matthew Hatton and Carson Jones ? not exactly the Four Horsemen of junior welterweights.
But Porter is hardly more accomplished. Not long ago, ?Showtime? struggled to a draw against bedraggled Julio Diaz, thought to be damaged goods as far back as 2002, when Juan ?Pollo? Valenzuela nearly atomized him in 116 gruesome seconds. Last year, Porter outpointed Devon Alexander in a dreary waltz and in his last outing, he played human demolition derby with Paulie Malignaggi, scoring a savage KO in four lopsided rounds. It was such a brutal stoppage that Malignaggi has been babbling like a psych ward inmate about PEDs ever since. When Porter and Brook answer the bell tomorrow night, both men will be trailed by questions. Certainly whatever answers they provide will be more interesting than most of what has happened on Showtime so far this year.
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Plenty has been written about the disastrous card Showtime aired last week at the Barclays Center headlined by Danny ?I really am Puerto Rican? Garcia and the completely unqualified Rod Salka, who stood a better chance of survival being blindsided by War Machine in a parking lot. But here are a few takeaways you may not find anywhere else:
Trotting out the old Buster Douglas clich? every time a 30-1 underdog pops up proves that some boxing people are clueless no matter who retweets their gibberish?
Believe it or not, Buster Douglas was an accomplished fighter long before his miracle act against Tyson. He had already challenged for a version of the heavyweight title (losing via TKO to Tony Tucker in 1987) and had a ledger that included wins over Tex Cobb, Oliver McCall, Greg Page and Trevor Berbick. That list, as uninspiring as it looks, includes two former titleholders and a future champion. Neither Rod Salka nor Edgar Santana had ever been anywhere near boxing mainstream in their careers (only Josesito Lopez ? whom Santana edged in 2008 ? can be counted as a fighter with any kind of standing in the boxing industry).
The no-hopers you see on Showtime or HBO these days are much different from Buster Douglas, whose (nearly) off-the-board standing in 1990 had more to do with how ?Iron? Mike Tyson was perceived than with how much talent Douglas may or may not have had. True, Douglas, whose limitations were often due to temperament, was not a streaking contender in the late-1980s but if you have trouble discerning between a former title challenger who had beaten his fair share of name opponents and Rod Salka, then maybe you ought to suspend your Twitter account.
Catchweights are not what they used to be?
Typically, a catchweight bout bridges the gap between two fighters from different divisions in order to mitigate a size disadvantage for the smaller man. Both fighters usually make concessions in order for the bout to come off. When Meldrick Taylor challenged Terry Norris for the junior middleweight title in 1992, for example, they met at 149 pounds. More recently, Manny Pacquiao agreed to a 144-pound catchweight to meet Juan Manuel Marquez in 2011. In the case of Danny Garcia and Rod Salka, however, Garcia actually moved up above his own weight class, making Salka leap past the junior welterweight limit. In other words, the supposed catchweight actually made it harder for Salka, not easier.
Not many people know what the word ?lineal? means?
If Danny Garcia is the lineal junior welterweight champion, then Bigfoot DOES exist and he is operating a gastropub in New Guinea with a staff of dodoes as waiters. Like the obsession with pound-for-pound ratings, the lineal label is more about the egos of some media members who believe they have the answers to everything. Just to be clear: All championship lines have been interrupted by vacancies, retirements or deaths. Pretending there is a ?man who beat the man who beat the man? is just elaborate fantasizing. General consensus, The Ring magazine champion, unified champion, undisputed champion ? all of these are closer to being acceptable than the term ?lineal,? which is handed out as randomly as the WBA names interim champions. Boxing has enough panjandrums running around; do we really need to have them fictionalizing history for us?
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In the last two weeks, both Jim Lampley and Mauro Ranallo made fairly strong statements about some of the bogus titles fought for on HBO and Showtime, respectively. Naturally, Lampley had the more eloquent jeremiad but neither blow-by-blow man delved into the nuances concerning Alphabet Group Agita. It was obviously not the time or place but here is one plain truth about sanctioning body insanity: everyone in boxing ? managers, trainers, fighters, advisors, networks, promoters and even the guys who handle the spit bucket ? pine for title belts (recent proof of how important titles are to the industry itself can be seen in the cloak-and-dagger maneuverings surrounding the Bernard Hopkins-Sergey Kovalev signing). Not only does owning a world title give a fighter leverage in negotiations; it also opens up opportunities for him since he will receive more offers based on the fact that he holds a WNBA belt.
Because few fighters make money in contemporary boxing, the titles also guarantee a certain amount of economic prosperity. Not long-term, maybe, but a WBX belt can lift a pro out of the $15,000-per-fight bracket instantaneously. Do you know what a fighter brings home from a $15,000 purse after managers, trainers, seconds and the IRS take a cut? And a bogus title shot can give an anonymous pug, likely plugging away for years in an unforgiving profession, a career-high payday. Yes, sanctioning bodies are ? and always have been ? corrupt, dishonest and avaricious. In other words, they are no different than most involved in the fight racket.
But when reformers harken back to the One Champion Era, they do so seemingly oblivious to the fact that boxing thrived across the country on every level during that time span. In the ?30s and ?40s, there were thousands of fighters and cards per year in the United States. As the second most popular sport in America for three decades (and arguably the most popular sport after the 1919 Black Sox Scandal), boxing was a self-sustaining industry. Believe it or not, a boxer did not need a title to make money back then. Jake LaMotta, for example, was rich long before he got his title shot. He owned several apartment buildings, a parking lot ? and even his own boxing arena. In the 1920s, Ruby Goldstein was paid a fortune to fight in six-rounders. Sid Terris, Art Aragon, Billy Petrolle and Young Stribling were rich and famous. Al Singer was a box-office sensation before he earned his crack at the lightweight championship of the world in 1930. Journeymen and clubfighters (two terms now viewed as pejoratives by folks who discovered boxing in 2008) made livings as full-time pros from New York City to Los Angeles.
Some fighters were uninterested in winning titles altogether. Pop Foster, who managed Jimmy McLarnin, a moneymaking machine in the 1930s, avoided championship fights because he did not want commissions burdening him with their demands. Foster wanted to make lucrative matches for McLarnin based on his own decisions and not have his fighter bogged down by regulatory edicts. From ?Babyface Goes to Hollywood? by Andrew Gallimore: ?If Jimmy was champion, the ring ?politicians? would take charge of his career because titleholders were restricted by commissions and often were not free to fight whom and when they pleased. Jimmy felt he could make just as much money and have a better time doing it if he didn?t have a crown tilted over his brow. Although never a champion, he got the bigger slices because he was the attraction.? (It should be noted that McLarnin, who eventually did win the welterweight championship, was also not high on the list of priorities for defending titlists in his day.)
Ignoring the socioeconomic context behind why more titles exist today than they did in the Good Old Days suggests a line straight from Oscar Wilde: ?Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.?
Nor was the One Champion Era as perfect as some would claim. Fractured titles existed long before Dan Rafael realized the WBC is wretched. The middleweight division was a shambles from the day Mickey Walker vacated the title in 1929 to the day Tony Zale unified against Georgie Abrams in 1941. Even Sugar Ray Robinson defended his Pennsylvania middleweight championship. Maryland, New York and Massachusetts also had title claimants. At one point, there were three middleweight champions simultaneously, a precursor to the nightmare of the late-1980s and beyond. Among the divisions with split titles at some point in the 1930s and 1940s were: flyweight, bantamweight, featherweight, lightweight, welterweight, middleweight and light heavyweight. By comparing sanctioning bodies to a Shangri-La that never existed, some well-meaning observers are going to keep running into against a simple concept that will shatter their romantic notions over and over again: reality.
Carlos Acevedo is the editor of The Cruelest Sport and a full member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. His work has appeared in Boxing Digest Magazine, Maxboxing, Boxing World Magazine and Esquina Boxeo. He is also a contributor to Remezcla and a member of the International Boxing Research Organization.
