By Scott Gilfoid: There’s a purse bid scheduled for September 12th for WBC heavyweight champion Bermane Stiverne and Deontay Wilder in case two fighter’s promoters are unable to negotiate a fight between them for later this year.
If goes to purse bids, then you can expect a fight to take place by November or December this year unless Stivern’s hand injury still isn’t healed by then.
If Stiverne is still injured, I wouldn’t be surprised if the World Boxing Council gives him the tag of ‘Champion in recess” so that Deontay can fight for the WBC title against the next available contender.
You really hate to see the WBC make this move, but they can’t just sit around waiting for injured champions to heal up for ages, because if there were the case there would be no money coming in from the action fights for the sanctioning fees.
Stiverne won the vacant WBC title earlier this year with a 6th round TKO win over Chris Arreola. That was a strange situation. I mean, Stiverne had soundly beaten Arreola last year in a one-sided 12 round decision.
Instead of the WBC moving Arreola down in order to have another contender challenge for the title, they ordered Arreola and Stiverne to fight each other once again, but this time for the vacant WBC heavyweight title.
It didn’t make any sense at all for Arreola to get two bites out of the apple. What it did was set up a situation where Showtime and HBO passed up on the idea of televising the fight. There was no reason given, but my guess is they knew how the fight would go after seeing the first fight.
Deontay (32-0, 32 Kos) has wiped out every opponent he’s faced since turning pro in 2008. His punching power makes him a threat to anyone in the heavyweight division, including Wladimir Klitschko. Deontay has seen Stiverne fight a number of times and he feels his style of made to order for him.
Stiverne doesn’t seem to have the stamina or the legs to stay in the center of the ring, so he generally winds up leaning against the ropes when he fights. It looks like he leans on the ropes to help support his 250+ weight. There’s probably not much Stiverne can change about his game for a rematch with Deontay, because at 35, Stiverne likely won’t be able to stay off the ropes even if he wanted to.
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