By Francisco Hernandez: The first two major fights of this year were expected to be great wars; they turned out to be miserable flops. Timothy Bradley vs. Devon Alexander was a glorified pillow fight, Nonito Donaire vs. Fernando Montiel turned out to be an uncompetitive mismatch. Fans expectations are now on Brandon Rios vs. Miguel Acosta to deliver what has been missing this year in major fights: competitive action packed wars in the ring.
If Brandon Rios wins this fight will he be considered P4P #3 in the world, since nowadays shyster writers are rating anyone who wins a fight a P4P# fighter. Although sensible fans know these ratings are meaningless, they are ways to market fighters and that is all, they don’t mean much nowadays. For example Floyd Mayweather who is usually considered #1, is a master boxer, but what has he done lately: he fought with a huge advantage in size against a smaller Juan Manuel Marquez who didn’t have the power to hurt Mayweather. Mayweather fought a slow and paralyzed Mosley who can only win against other shot fighters like Antonio Margarito. Mayweather needs to clean up the welterweight division to really be considered great.
Take the Filipino demon Manny Pacquiao who is considered P4P#1 by many. Pacquiao is a great brawler, no one doubts that, but his recent fights have not been competitive, his opponents have glittery names but they are past their better days, he is staging another one of these shyster Arum fights with Shane Mosley. Pacquiao is another one who has not cleaned up the welterweight division, he cannot be called the best in the division until he does this.
A fighter should be considered as one of the best only if he can unify all or most of the titles in his division, and defeats the best contenders in his division. That is the way it used to be done in the old days. A fighter cannot be called the best as long as there remains standing another fighter in the division that is considered capable of beating him. If the best fighters in the division don’t fight each other, there can only be speculations, nothing is determined until they get into the ring. To the point: a fighter needs to clean up a division and leave no serious contenders standing, to be considered a real P4P champion. All these fighters that are now ranked as P4P don’t really measure up, no matter how much their fans foam at the mouth about them.
Comments are closed.