Cleverly to defend his WBO strap against Hawk on Saturday

By Boxing News - 11/04/2012 - Comments

Image: Cleverly to defend his WBO strap against Hawk on SaturdayBy Scott Gilfoid: In yet another example of soft match-making involving WBO light heavyweight champion Nathan Cleverly (24-0, 11 KO’s) he’ll be defending his World Boxing Organization 175 pound title this Saturday night in a Showtime televised fight against non-top 15 ranked Shawn Hawk (23-2-1, 17 KO’s) on the undercard of the Erislandy Lara vs. Vanes Martirosyan fight at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California.

What I want to know is why and how is the WBO allowing the Cleverly-Hawk fight to count as a title defense for the 25-year-old Cleverly when Hawk isn’t even ranked in the top 15 by any of the sanctioning bodies? I had heard that the WBO would make it a 10 round bout if Cleverly fought a 2nd tier fighter. Well, here Cleverly is fighting a 2nd tier fighter in the painfully slow 28-year-old Hawk, who is coming off of one-sided 12 round unanimous loss to Eleider Alvarez last June, and the WBO apparently is going to let this count as a title defense for Cleverly.

Gee, that’s real good for boxing, eh? Having a champion being able to defend his title against 2nd tier fighters and the WBO counting that as title defense. At this rate Cleverly could still be a world champion when he’s 50 if he can just fight 2nd tier guys and the WBO counts as a title defense.

It’s pretty sad if you ask me. But what’s worse is Showtime is going to televise this face across the United States to the American public. The casual boxing fans will see Cleverly dominate Hawk and then think he’s great rather than putting the fight in perspective and realizing that Cleverly is facing another easy mark. This is pretty disappointing.

Hawk is replacing Ryan Coyne, a little known American contender that was picked out by Cleverly’s promoter to fight him. That fight was blocked by Coyne’s past promoter, so it won’t go ahead for that reason. To be honest I don’t know of anyone that really cares that Coyne isn’t getting the fight. It amounts to the same with Cleverly still facing an unknown fighter in the U.S. The United States is so big that there a tons of fighters that boxing fans have never heard of even if they’re ranked in the top 15 like Coyne was.

I’d never seen Hawk fight before until last night in scouting him on Youtube in watching him look totally awful in beating Henry Buchanan. I had watched the entire fight and had Buchanan winning it. Hawk looks very, very, very slow, and he doesn’t throw a lot of punches. He’s stiff, not a big puncher and easy to hit. Judging him from the fights I saw of him last night, I see Hawk as a HUGE step down from Cleverly’s last opponent Tommy Karpency, who was little more than a fringe contender at best.

I got a kick out of this comment from Cleverly to ESPN: “Next year I have got an opportunity to take on the best in the world and make a legacy of my own.”

Legacy? How? By fighting the likes of Robin Krasniqi? That’s the guy that Cleverly has to fight next. He’s not going to get Bernard Hopkins, and it won’t matter if he fights Beibut Shumenov because he doesn’t have a large fan base in the U.S. How is Cleverly going to establish a legacy fighting the likes of Karpency, Krasniqi and Hawk?



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