By Scott Gilfoid: WBC lightweight champion Adrien Broner (25-0, 21 KO’s) won’t likely be getting the unification bout that he’s been wanting for some time against WBO lightweight champ Ricky Burns because the Brit isn’t ready to take the fight and it’s unclear right now if he ever will. Broner is scheduled to fight on February 16th on HBO at the Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and the options for this fight are absolutely poor for the 23-year-old Broner.
Broner may have been thinking that there would be tons of interesting opponents after he moved up to lightweight in November of this year, but there really isn’t. Broner basically cleaned out the division by beating the only real good fighter in Antonio DeMarco, because the rest of the contenders and champions just aren’t talented enough to give Broner any real test.
Besides that, there’s no big names for Broner to fight at lightweight, none. Broner would be best to move up to light welterweight as soon as possible and leave the ghost town of the lightweight division to the lesser talents.
As far as Broner’s February 16th fight goes, Broner may end up facing someone like Ray Beltran or Daniel Estrada. Heck, those aren’t even worthy enough fights for HBO to televise Broner’s next fight, and I don’t see a fight between Broner and IBF champion Miguel Vazquez as being any better. Who wants to watch Broner chase a tall 5’10” Vazquez around the ring all night long? That would make for ugly entertainment at its worst. I wouldn’t even want to watch Broner fight Vazquez on ESPN, because it’s just a bad fight. The only interesting opponent in the entire division for Broner is Richard Abril, but he’s not going to be available.
Since Broner fights for Golden Boy Promotions, who have no qualms about matching their fighters against guys from other divisions, my thoughts are that Golden Boy should look to the super featherweight division and look to match Broner against WBA champ Takashi Uchiyama or the light welterweight division to have Broner fight Paul McCloskey, Ruslan Provodnikov or Thomas Dulorme.
I think those would be interesting fights for different reasons. Provodnikov, Dulorme and Uchiyama are straight up sluggers with excellent power and they’d make it interesting for Broner. McCloskey would be good because it would be a good measuring stick to see how Broner does against the same guy that Amir Khan beat. To be sure, Broner would have to chase McCloskey around the ring all night like he would against Miguel Vazquez, but it wouldn’t be quite as bad because McCloskey isn’t nearly as slick as Vazquez.
Broner needs to bail on the lightweight division asap because it was one of the god awful worst divisions in boxing. Broner beat the only good fighter in the division and now he’s left with no one interesting to fight.
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