By Chris Williams: In a stay busy fight, International Boxing Federation (IBF) middleweight champion Arthur Abraham (28-0, 23 KOs) will defend his title against number #13 ranked challenger Lajuan Simon (21-0, 12 KOs) at the Ostseehalle, Kiel, in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. With a potential unification fight against WBC/WBO middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik in the near future, I suppose one can’t blame Abraham for wanting to make an easy defense of his title and get an easy payday in the process.
However, this is Abraham’s second easy defense of his title after destroying 38-year-old Raul Marquez in a 6th round stoppage in November 2008. One would hope that Abraham might choose a little tougher gauge of opponent that Simon, who though undefeated, has fought exactly no one good enough to mention or good enough to be ranked in the top 15 in the IBF.
Instead of fighting Simon, I would prefer Abraham to fight someone like Peter Quillin, Roman Karmazin, or Brian Vera before stepping in the ring with a fighter as green as Simon. Abraham needs to avoid ending up like his fellow countryman Felix Sturm, the WBA middleweight champion, who has been mostly sheltered in Germany, fighting soft opposition and staying away from tougher, more challenging fighters like Quillin, Winky Wright. However, in fairness to Abraham, the middleweight division is perhaps at the weakest point that it’s been in many, many years with few talented fighters in the division.
It seems as if the quality fighters have either moved up to super middleweight or moved down to the light middleweight division, leaving the middleweight division with less than impressive champions like Pavlik, Sturm and Abraham. In the 90s, probably none of those fighters would have been good enough to hold a belt, because they would have been not talented enough to beat Bernard Hopkins and Roy Jones Jr., among many other top fighters.
However, with the diluted talent that exists now at middleweight, we now see Pavlik, Abraham and Sturm able to succeed for long periods of time. Yet with the lack of talent in the division, I would still like to see these fighters seeking out the best in the division instead of taking easy fights when taking on non-mandatory challengers like Simon.
Abraham, 28, has held onto the IBF middleweight belt since defeating Kingsley Ikeke by a 5th round stoppage in December 2005. Since that time, Abraham has twice defeated Edison Miranda, and then defeated a string of other less well known fighters in one-sided fights. By now, I would have liked Abraham to either seek out a fight against a top light middleweight like Vernon Forrest or Alfredo Angulo, or else take on a good super middleweight like Carl Froch or Mikkel Kessler instead of beating one mediocre middleweight after another.
If Abraham’s goal is to try and hold onto his middleweight title as long as possible, then by all means, he should continue moving in the direction that he’s been going since winning the title, but if he wants to try and accomplish something, he needs to move beyond the soft confines of the middleweight division.
Clearly, a fight against Pavlik, if he does take the fight, is a good start for Abraham, but he needs to quit playing it safe and start seeking out other good fighters like Quillin or fighters in other divisions.
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