By Dan Ambrose: Showtime vice president in charge of sports Stephen Espinoza says that his network will be having a light heavyweight tournament to get an eventual unified titlist. However, the tournament won’t have arguably the best fighter [Sergey Kovalev] in the division taking part in it due to him fighting on HBO. In other words, Showtime’s tournament will likely only result in the 2nd best fighter being discovered, which kind of makes a mockery of the whole of a tournament.
The fighters in the tournament are as follows: Bernard Hopkins [49], Adonis Stevenson [36] and Beibut Shumenov [30].
The tourney is kind of a joke because Hopkins will obviously beat Shumenov, and then lose to Stevenson. We already saw Hopkins lose to Chad Dawson in 2011, and the only reason Hopkins has done well since then is because he’s been matched against weak opponents in Tavoris Cloud and Karo Murat. Hopkins is not in the same class as Stevenson at this point in his career, and he’ll clearly lose badly to him when and if they fight.
Espinoza could save a lot of time if he just excluded Shumenov and went straight with the Hopkins-Stevenson fight, and called it a fight for the No.2 fighter in the division. Stevenson can’t be considered the best when he chose to move on from HBO rather than sticking it out and not taking the fight that HBO wanted him to take against the hard hitting Kovalev.
“What we’re really trying to do is amass all of the title holders and get a unified champion in the division,” Espinoza said to RingTV. “We have [Beibut] Shumenov at Showtime, and we have [Bernard] Hopkins at Showtime, and we now have Adonis Stevenson, and those are three major title holders. Kovalev has a fourth title…but since he’s not available, we’ll proceed we’ll proceed in what we hope will result in a unified titlist.”
Espinoza will get a unified champion from the tiny tournament, but he won’t get the best fighter. He’ll get an untested paper champion in Stevenson winning the tournament and it won’t have proven anything. Hopkins lost to Chad Dawson not long ago, and Stevenson destroyed Dawson. So why does Showtime need a tournament?
The fact that Kovalev can’t take part in the tournament due to him being on HBO, pretty much undermines the whole idea of this being a tournament. You can’t have it be a tournament without the best fighter in the division not taking place in it.
Once this so-called tournament is over with, Espinoza is going to be left with Stevenson not having anyone to fight unless Espinoza wants him to face Shumenov, who Hopkins will have already beaten. Like I said, Espinoza will be left with Stevenson with no one to fight. There aren’t any big names in the division besides Hopkins, Kovalev and Stevenson. You’re not going to get the super middleweights like Andre Ward, Carl Froch and Mikkel Kessler moving up to 175 to fight Stevenson. That’s not going to happen. Espinoza will be left with Stevenson beating up on little known fighters one after another in fights that will likely fail to interest fans.
Stevenson will be fighting for the first time on Showtime in a mismatch on May 24th against a guy that is way out of his class named Andrzej Fonfara (25-2, 15 KO’s) at the Bell Centre, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Fonfara recently had to struggle to defeat the past their best fighters Glen Johnson and Gabriel Campillo.
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