By Chris Williams: The winner of the June 27th on HBO between #1 WBO 147lb contender Tim Bradley (31-1-1, 12 KOs) and light welterweight Jessie Vargas (26-0, 9 KOs), who isn’t ranked at all in the welterweight division, must face #4 WBO Sadam Ali (22-0, 13 KOs) in their first defense of the WBO title, according to Dan Rafael of ESPN.
The Bradley-Vargas Top Rank promoted fight will be taking place at the StubHub Center in Carson, California. The title should be in the hands of Floyd Mayweather Jr. after his one-sided 12 round decision win over an injured Manny Pacquiao on May 2nd, but he didn’t want the title.
You can’t blame Mayweather for not having any interest in keeping the WBO belt because he would have had to defend it against Tim Bradley, and that would be a real dull fight due to Bradley’s lack of success in his last couple of fights.
Bradley lost to Pacquiao last year, and then followed it up with a 12 round draw against Diego Chaves. The two seems to be rewarding Bradley for his failures by letting him fight for their title. It makes no sense at all.
It would be like a NFL team going to the Super Bowl after having been beaten and held to a tie in their two games. The WBO should have dropped Bradley from their No.1 ranking and promoted someone else who was doing better in terms of wins and losses.
Sadam Ali, 26, is coming off of an unimpressive 10 round unanimous decision win over Francisco Santana last month on April 25th. The fight was not one of Ali’s better ones. He got the victory, but he took a lot of head shots against a very limited fighter.
The WBO is giving the Bradley-Vargas winner a huge break in having Ali as the WBO mandatory because he’s not that great of a fighter, and I don’t think he’s ready to fight someone like Bradley. Vargas is likely to lose the fight against Bradley, so I don’t see him as being a factor here. Before the Santana fight, Ali stopped Luis Carlos Abregu in the 9th round last November. Ali isn’t a big puncher, but Abregu was hurt by a lucky shot in the 6th and he never seemed to recover from the blow.
Rather than Vargas and Bradley getting a shot at the vacant WBO welterweight title, arguably deserving fighters would be Shawn Porter and Errol Spence Jr. I think those guys should be fighting for the WBO title, not Bradley and light welterweight Vargas.
Letting a 140lb fighter leapfrog over welterweight contenders just seems wrong, and as I said, I don’t think Bradley deserves to be fighting for a world title after his last two fights with his record of 0-1-1. That’s not the type of record a fighter should have for him to be ranked #1 by an organization like the WBO and fighting for a world title.
Comments are closed.