By Yannis Mihanos: In boxing the fighter who’s the strongest in the rankings calls the shots. That gives him the opportunity to make the right choices but also the wrong ones. The right choices for a fighter will be to make no exceptions and no selections, and just fight who is the best out there available. A champion must fight another champion.
The wrong choices can be much more perplexed and involve often cherry picking.
In other articles I have described the champion who constantly acts like that as paper champ.
To take advantage of his status as a recognized top performer the paper champ starts to select opponents with different criteria much more suited to his selfish needs.
One reason why doing that is because is so sweet being alone at the top, and the winner takes all kind of thing. They say in politics that absolute power corrupts absolutely; it can be also valid here. As his success continues the paper champ gets more offers, more money and more publicity even if it will be mostly negative. Life will continue to be good.
There is also another reason for that and it’s often found in Mother Nature: it is called the energy conservation principle. A survival of the strongest or fittest kind of thing.
In the jungle, great predators like lions or tigers attack first usually to the weak ones: these will be the wounded preys or the small baby ones. This will help them waste as less energy as possible and live good another day.
Boxing as we know except from a Gentleman’s Sport is also a brutal sport. People get constantly hit in the most vital organs of the body: the head and the stomach and whoever inflicts more damage wins.
The paper champ wants by any means to avoid that. He wants to save that precious energy at any cost and so he will select fighters that will harm and wear him of less. He will chose the ones who are weak mentally or physically. Physically might be fighters past their prime, spent forces who their body has already taken its toll or promising fighters that are less mature and developed.
The mentally weak are those who easily break in terms of concentration and willpower.
The mental aspect includes also fighters who corrupt easily according to the circumstances. These can be fighters who set primarily as a goal to earn enough so one day to get out of boxing. There are these kind of fighters who are hungry mostly for money rather than the fame. It’s a fact and is not found exclusively in boxing but in many other parts of life.
Some say that everyone has a prize. I don’t abide to that as I believe that other things are more important in life like health and dignity.
But there are always some boxers who value money just a little bit higher than it should be. They might be coming from extremely poor backgrounds or have no moral values.
So when that big offer arrives they just can’t say no even if that means they will have to underperform and get beaten.
For just one fight someone might earn a million or millions. That’s a temptation hard to resist or ignore.
There is also the double bind; a take it or leave it kind of thing: If the proposed fighter says no to the offer he might never have a second chance. For many this can be the perfect retirement money. Again it depends on the person. Not everybody is capable enough to get a title shot often or ever again. It depends on the ability, the character but also sometimes in luck.
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