By Benny James: After a recent article published on this site about how boxing is NOT dead, I thought I would write a series of articles on problems I think need to be addressed in boxing is the sport is going to grow again.
The first subject on my hit list is world titles. WBA, WBC, IBF, WBO, THE RING… Which belt do you need to hold to be the real champion of the world? Do you need them all or a majority of them? Or is one of those titles of more value than the rest?
The truth is in 2012 all those “world titles” are worthless. Promoters can buy world titles for their fighters these days.
Most of the champions refuse to fight each other and prefer to take easy defenses to milk their time at the top.
Compare Joe Calzaghe to a true British champion, Carl Froch. Froch has spent years fighting genuine world class opposition, everyone put in front of him he has gone out and given it his best shot. Whether he had to travel to the other side of the world or fight in his own backyard, nobody can say Carl Froch is not a true hero of our sport.
In my opinion world titles do not matter any more. They are pointless and only serve to help promoters make money and generate “sanctioning fee’s” for the organization the title belongs too. Yes that’s right, if you are the WBA champion and you want to defend your title then you have to PAY the WBA to sanction your fight. What the hell do these organizations do for the hundreds of thousands of dollars they charge to sanction a fight? The answer is next to nothing! They make it legal for the fight to take place and then release stupid press releases and biased rankings.
Another example of how pointless titles are comes in the form of former British heavyweight champion Tyson Fury. He beat a genuine champion in Dereck Chisora to capture the British title, then not soon after the organization tried to force a fight the fans want to see between David Price and Tyson Fury. Fury opted to lose the respect of any true boxing fan, dump his British title and take some easy televised fights against some fat, old Americans. Now he talks about a world title. He has no chance, and the odds are even if by some miracle he won a world title he would vacate his title as soon as they tried to force him to fight someone with half a chance of knocking his block off. Tyson “Mr Irish Heavyweight Champion”, you are a disgrace.
Now back to the subject at hand. I propose a solution (for what its worth), all these global sanctioning bodies need to come to an agreement and start to merge together to form a single organization that will sanction fights, have an accurate ranking system and only one true champion per weight class. While your at it lower the number of weight classes, we dont need so many. Boxing needs to turn the clock back when it comes to weight classes etc… if its to stand a chance of competing with other combat sports taking the youth by storm (MMA I am talking about you). Everyone knows who the best MMA fighter is in each division, the UFC champion.
When it comes to boxing and world titles I have come to the realization its not the title that matters, but who you have beaten to get it.
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