By Allan Fox: Golden Boy Promotions CEO Richard Schaefer doesn’t appear eager to put 48-year-old IBF light heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins (53-6-2, 32 KO’s) in with his IBF-ordered challenger Sergiy Kovalev (21-0-1, 19 KO’s).
Schaefer is complaining that he hasn’t heard of Kovalev before and that he prefers to match Hopkins against other world champions.
It doesn’t look like Schaefer is going to have any choice in the matter unless he wants Hopkins to vacate his IBF title so that he can fight those other champions.
Schaefer said this as tweeted by Chris Mannix of Sports Illustrated: “I don’t know how attractive that fight is. I’ve never heard of [Kovalev]. That doesn’t mean he is now a good. Bernard wants historically significant fights, and that means unifications.”
What Schaefer may not realize is that being a world champion means that you have to fight your mandatory challengers every once in a while. You can’t captured a world title and the fight whoever you please while the mandatory challengers age while waiting for the day that they’ll finally get a title challenge.
The sport has to be controlled because if you have champions fighting whoever they please and ignoring mandatory challengers, then it takes away the meaning of being a champion. It becomes something other than a champion.
Schaefer is going to leave it up to Hopkins to decide if he wants to face Kovalev or not. However, if Hopkins chooses not to face him then he’s going to have to decide on a few options to get around the fight: vacate the title, pay Kovalev a step aside fee, or go to the International Boxing Federation and ask them for permission to bypass Kovalev so that he can fight a unification bout against one of the light heavyweight champions.
The sanctioning bodies usually allow a champion to skip past a mandatory if they’re going to be fighting a unification bout. However, they can only do this once; they can’t fight unification after unification with the mandatory challenger by bypassed consecutively.
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