By Chris Williams: The January 29th fight between World Boxing Organization (WBO) light welterweight champion Timothy Bradley (26-0, 11 KO’s) and WBC light welterweight champion Devon Alexander (21-0, 13 KO’s) will only have Bradley’s WBO title on the line for the fight, according to World Boxing News . Net. It seems that Bradley doesn’t want to pay the sanctioning fees for the WBC title to be on the line. It hardly matters if the fight won’t be a unification title, because it’s clear that these are two of the better fighters in the light welterweight division and having another strap on the line or not on the line in this case doesn’t matter one bit to the average fan.

I don’t blame Bradley for not paying the sanctioning fees for the title. Fighting for another useless strap is a waste of time. All boxing fans care about is who the better fighter is, not the owner of all these paper titles. What matters is that he beats Alexander and then moves on to take on the winner of the December 11th clash between WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan and WBA light welterweight interim champ Marcos Maidana. If Bradley can beat Alexander and then the winner of the Khan-Maidana fight, he will have almost cleared out the division. The only fighter remaining after that would be Victor Ortiz, and maybe Zab Judah if he doesn’t get beaten by Kaiser Mabuza when he fights for the IBF light welterweight title next.

The Bradley-Alexander fight still doesn’t have a venue for the fight. It’s doubtful Bradley will want to travel to Saint Louis to fight in Alexander’s back yard, even though that’s probably the only place where they’ll be able to get a huge crowd for this fight.

Alexander recently defeated former WBA light welterweight champion Andriy Kotelnik by a 12 round unanimous decision while fighting at home in Saint Louis. The judges scored it 116-112, 116-112 and 116-112. However, many boxing fans, including this writer, had Alexander losing the fight. He looked terrible throughout and almost like a novice. If he doesn’t improve on that performance, I can see Bradley easily winning this fight and moving on to take on the Khan-Maidana winner.

Bradley, 27, recently moved up in weight and defeated Luis Carlos Abregu by a 12 round unanimous decision in July. However, Bradley looked sloppy in that fight and was hit a lot by the Argentinian slugger. Before that, Bradley defeated Lamont Peterson by a one-sided 12 round decision in December 2009. Bradley looked a lot better in that fight and had Peterson hurt on a number of occasions.