Wladimir wants Stiverne fight

By Boxing News - 05/12/2014 - Comments

wladimir32By Allan Fox: IBF/IBO/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko (62-3, 52 KO’s) wants a shot at WBC heavyweight champion Bermane Stiverne (24-1-1, 21 KO’s) in the near future if possible in order to get a chance to win the last major heavyweight title not already in his possession. Wladimir has a fight tentatively scheduled already, though, against his #1 IBF challenger Kubrat Pulev (20-0, 11 KO’s) on September 6th at the O2 World, Altona, in Hamburg, Germany. A fight between Wladimir and Stiverne will likely have to wait until 2015, if at all.

Stiverne and his promoter Don King still haven’t said whether they’re interested in taking a unification fight against the 6’6″ Wladimir, and it’s quite possible that they’ll say no to his request for a fight. While it would be a good payday for Stiverne if he were to take that fight, he’d very likely lose his title and then be relegated to contender status once again. Stiverne won’t get as much money for his normal title defenses, but if he holds onto the WBC title for a year or two, he’ll end up making a lot more money in the long run than he’d make in a single unification fight against Wladimir.

“I hope that the sanctioning bodies will speak the same language and we find a solution to allow me to fight for the WBC title,” Wladimir said to ESPN. “If not, I will go the other way. I have no influence on it. I know it’s complicated to become champion and get things like that done. There are a lot of sanctioning bodies and obligations. I just hope the sanctioning bodies will be supportive of this unification fight.”

Wladimir seems to be assuming that King and Stiverne are going to go along with the idea of fighting him. The only way that happens is if it’s financially worthwhile to take one big payday rather than smaller ones. Stiverne has a chance to take an easy optional title defense next followed by a mandatory defense against Deontay Wilder, his mandatory challenger. There’s a good chance that Stiverne will win his next two fights, and continue to win if he can get past tough contenders like Bryant Jennings and Mike Perez.

If Wladimir ends up beating Stiverne, there will be less heavyweight fights because it’ll be one less heavyweight champion, and Wladimir will be continually busy taking care of mandatory challengers from the other sanctioning bodies. As we saw recently with Alex Leapai, some sanctioning bodies push less than highly contenders to the top of their rankings, and that sets up a lot of mismatches. The WBC seems to be one of the rare sanctioning bodies that has high quality heavyweights ranked at the top.



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