By Erik Schmidt: World Boxing Association middleweight champion Felix Sturm (31-2-1, 13 KOs) will be making a non-mandatory defense of his title on April 25th against WBA number #14th ranked middleweight Koji Sato (14-0, 13 KOs) at the KoenigPALAST, Krefeld, in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany. Sturm, 30, will be making his 6th defense of his WBA title against his mostly unknown, little heard of Japanese opponent Sato. Sturm, who competed for Germany in the 2000 Olympics, is following his usual pattern of fighting the bottom of the WBA when taking on a non-mandatory opponent, although it appears that he’s always fighting soft opponents.
That’s actually not true, because he’s defended his WBA title three times against his number #1 mandatory since winning the title with a 12-round unanimous decision over Javier Castillejo in April 2007. The problem for Sturm, is that the WBA is severely lacking in quality fighters, and that even when Sturm is defending against the number #1 guy, there’s the perception that he’s facing another 2nd tier fighter that few boxing fans have ever heard of.
If Sturm was the holder of the IBF crown, currently held by Arthur Abraham, that wouldn’t be the case. In the IBF, you have good fighters like Peter Quillen, John Duddy and Roman Karmazin. Even those fighters, however, are far from flawed, and it shows how truly bad the middleweight division is at this point.
Sturm’s opponent for the 25th, Sato, has fought all but one of his 14 fights in the comforts of Japan against fighters that are largely unknown. Sato has done his job in knocking out, which may or may not indicate that Sato can punch. However, based on the fact that not one of his opponents have a recognizable name, it’s probably safe to say that Sato doesn’t belong anywhere near the top 15 in the middleweight division, and especially not fighting against a champion.
That’s what makes this fight so especially bad. When choosing opponents, Sturm needs to try and select them a little more carefully and try to choose fighters that the public knows and cares about rather than just looking for a bottom rung fighter to easily beat so that he can pad his bank account without worrying about getting hurt. In two of Sturm’s defenses, he did just this in fighting Noe Gonzalez Alcoba and Jamie Pittman, showing that he was looking to take an easy path.
Sturm fought to a 12-round draw with Randy Griffin in October 2007, a fight where Sturm got badly out-punched by Griffin and looked to have lost. The fight was in his native Germany, and he was given what looked to be a gift draw. He took a lot of punishment in that fight. Instead of giving Griffin an immediate rematch, Sturm made Griffin wait nine months while Sturm slipped in an easy defense of his title against non-mandatory challenger Jamie Pittman.
In the rematch with Griffin, Sturm defeated him by a close 12-round decision in July 2008. This time, Sturm appeared to win the fight, but he looked mediocre and dull to watch.
In his last fight, Sturm defeated Sebastian Sylvester by an impressive 12-round unanimous decision in November. This was perhaps Sturms’ best fight since turning pro, because he defeated a quality fighter in Sylvester and made him look easy.
Sato may be a good fighter, but it’s hard to tell because he’s fought mainly obscure Japanese fighters in Japan. More likely, his record is padded and he’ll easily be defeated by Sturm much in the same way that the unknown Pittman and Alcoba were by Sturm.
Sturm may not take on soft opponents all the time, but he doesn’t help himself by taking the softest opponent he can find when choosing to fight his non-mandatory challengers. He hurts his case by not giving the German fans a good fight to watch with all these mismatches that he tends to set up.
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