Gilberto Ramirez vs. Dominik Britsch on Crawford-Postol card

By Boxing News - 05/02/2016 - Comments

ramirez94By Dan Ambrose: Unbeaten WBO super middleweight champion Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramirez (34-0, 24 KOs) will be defending his title for the first time on July 23 against German fighter Dominik Britsch (32-2-1, 11 KOs) in the co-feature bout on the Terence Crawford (28-0, 20 KO) vs. Viktor Postol (28-0, 12 KOs) card on HBO pay-per-view at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The 24-year-old Ramirez recently won the WBO title in beating champion Arthur Abraham by a one-sided 12 round unanimous decision last April on the undercard of the Manny Pacquiao vs. Tim Bradley III fight in Las Vegas. Ramirez won an easy fight in beating 36-year-old Abraham by the scores of 120-108 x 3.

It was too easy for the 6’2” Ramirez. Now after that victory, Ramirez will be taking a voluntary defense against the 28-year-old Britsch from Germany. It’s unclear why Ramirez’s 84-year-old promoter Bob Arum is matching him against such an easy mark in Britsch.

Arum was talking about wanting to match Ramirez against IBF/IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin because he fancied his chances of beating the Kazakhstan star.

Arum wants to turn Ramirez into a star in a real hurry. However, matching him so softly by putting him against Britsch doesn’t make much sense. The German fighter isn’t ranked in the top 15 by any of the sanctioning bodies, and he’s struggled even against weaker fighters. Britsch has won his last four fights against obscure opposition since losing to Soufiene Ouerghi in 2014. Britsch was also beaten by Roberto Santos in 2012.

“July 23, Bud Crawford vs. Postol fight now official. Presser next Tuesday. Ramire Zurdo will defend in the co-feature vs. Dominik Britsch,” said Dan Rafael on his Twitter.

Postol vs. Crawford is a unification fight at 140. Crawford, the WBO light welterweight champion, will be putting his title on the line against WBC light welterweight champion Viktor Postol. It’s a good fight, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense for it to be televised on HBO PPV. There are no available dates on regular HBO, apparently. That’s why it’s going to be on PPV.

Arum thinks Crawford-Postol will bring in 100,000 PPV buys. That would put in the same ballpark as Gennady Golovkin’s fight against David Lemieux. Since I don’t see Crawford as being anywhere near as popular as Golovkin, I see the Crawford-Postol fight possibly 10,000 PPV buys, maybe even less than that.

It might be embarrassingly low unless Ramirez’s fans can save the day by pumping up the numbers. But here’s the problem with that; putting Ramirez in with a no name like Britsch means that we probably see too many boxing being willing to open their piggy banks to pay whatever Top Rank is asking the fans to pay to see the Crawford-Postol card on PPV.

If Ramirez were fighting Andre Ward, Golovkin, James DeGale or Badou Jack, then maybe fans would want to pay to see the card in fairly large numbers. That’s not happening though. Showtime has Ramirez in a showcase [read: mismatch] fight on July 23 and they’re making that the co-feature bout on the Crawford-Postol card. I don’t see that as a smart move.