By Jason Kim: Tonight, unbeaten and untested WBA World heavyweight champion Alexander Povetkin (24-0, 16 KO’s) defends his title against former WBC heavyweight champion Hasim Rahman (50-7-2, 41 KO’s) at the Sporthalle, Alsterdorf, in Hamburg, Germany. On the undercard, heavyweights Alexander Ustinov (27-0, 21 KO’s) battles EBU heavyweight champion Kubrat Pulev (16-0, 8 KO’s) for his European Boxing Union title in an IBF heavyweight eliminator bout with the winner becoming the mandatory contender to IBF heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko.

Rahman, 39, feels like he’s got enough left in the tank to pull of a knockout victory over Povetkin. However, it doesn’t look likely that Rahman will be able to do this because it’s been so many years since he beat his last quality opponent. He’s ranked #1 by the WBA, but he’s not stayed relevant by facing the best heavyweights since losing to Wladimir in a failed title shot in 2008. The sad part about the sanctioning bodies is that guys like Rahman are often pushed to the very top of the division despite having facing nothing but poor opposition in the last four years.

This is obviously a bad part of the game because then it just leads to other fighters facing nothing but weak opposition to get an inflated resume and ranking in order to get a title shot. Ideally, fighters should have to earn their way to a #1 ranking by beating at least two contenders to get the shot. By doing this, we’d likely have more competitive fights for titles instead of seeing guys like Rahman getting a title shot after beating five C level heavyweights, which is what Rahman has done to get tonight’s title shot against Povetkin.

Unless Rahman can land a big shot to KO Povetkin tonight, we’ll be seeing an easy win for the Russian Povetkin. He’s too young and much too busy for an old heavyweight to beat him.

The undercard match-up between Ustinov and Pulev is a lot better fight in my opinion because both guys have been fighting decent quality opposition and have shown a lot of skills along the way. Pulev, 6’4 1/2″, might have the edge in this fight because he’s a little quicker than Ustinov and has looked good in beating Derric Rossey, Travis Walker, Alexander Dimitrenko, Michael Sprott, Dominick Guinn, Paolo Vidoz and Maksym Pedyura. The 31-year-old Bulgarian Pulev is a really rugged heavyweight with lot of amateur experience. You could say that Pulev might have too much amateur experience because he should have turned pro well before 2009 and ended up wasting valuable years in the amateur ranks.