By Scott Gilfoid: WBO light heavyweight champion Nathan Cleverly (24-0, 11 kO’s) states that one of the reasons why he’s come over to the United States to try and make a name for himself is that he’s run out of challenges in his home country of the UK after having beaten the top guys.

Cleverly said “It was going great in the UK but there were no other challenges after I wiped the floor with [Tony] Bellew.”

Cleverly will be fighting on Saturday night against 2ns tier light heavyweight Shawn Hawk (23-2-1, 17 KO’s) at the Staples Center, in Los Angeles, California, USA. The World Boxing Organization are counting this as a title defense for the 25-year-old Cleverly despite the fact that Hawk isn’t ranked in the top 15 by any of the sanctioning bodies in the sport.

It’s odd that the WBO are letting this fight count as title defense because normally champions have to fight actual contenders in order for it to count as a title defense. Hawk is a last minute replacement but that’s still not much of an excuse for the fight to count as a title defense.

Cleverly defeated Bellew by a 12 round majority decision last year in a fight that was pretty close. Bellew might have won the fight had he not run out of gas in the last three rounds and basically given the fight away. I hardly think that was a case of Cleverly wiping the floor with Bellew as he says he did. It was more of a case of Cleverly barely winning the fight if anything. What’s strange is that Cleverly never attempted to give Bellew a rematch despite the great interest from boxing fans in seeing one.

Instead of fighting Bellew again, fans got to see Cleverly fight a little known fringe contender by the name of Tommy Karpency in a god awful one-sided fight. Now Cleverly’s fans are getting to see him fight a 2nd tier fighter in Hawk instead of Bellew. They’re getting a real treat from him, aren’t they? It seems like Cleverly is going about winning over fans in a wrong-headed manner.