By Scott Gilfoid: WBO light heavyweight champion Nathan Cleverly (24-0, 11 KO’s) is coming over to the United States to try and make a name for himself after having come up well short in the UK. He’s going to get a free pass from American boxing fans for his first fight because he’s fighting a last minute replacement opponent Shawn Hawk (23-2-1, 17 KO’s) this Saturday night Staples Center, in Los Angeles, California.

The fight is attracting some attention from hardcore boxing fans but it likely won’t register a bleep among casual fans because they’ve heard of Cleverly and they’ve never heard of Hawk either. And the fight will be a mismatch without excitement, so Cleverly won’t even have that going for him in this case. Okay, so it won’t be really bad for Cleverly this time around, but if he doesn’t start stepping it up and fighting quality opposition soon, like in his next fight, then he can forget about making a name for himself in the U.S.

Sure, he can lip service about coming to the U.S to make it big but he won’t do it, not with him fighting guys like Hawk, Tommy Karpency, Aleksy Kuziemski, Tony Bellew, Nadjib Mohammedi, Karo Murat, Antonio Brancalion, Courtney Fry and Danny McIntosh. Those are the guys that Cleverly has been fighting for the past three years and that’s just not doing the job if you ask me.

These are the guys that Cleverly should have been fighting:

Bernard Hopkins
Beibut Shumenov
Chad Dawson
Mikkel Kessler
Lucian Bute
Andre Dirrell
Andre Ward
Arthur Abraham
Issac Chilemba
Edison Miranda
Tavoris Cloud
Cornelius White
Edwin Rodriguez
Thomas Oosthuizen
Denis Grachaev
Ismayl Sillakh

I realize that some of them are super middleweights but with the light heavyweight division being PAINFULLY WEAK, Cleverly should have been pooling from that division eons ago instead of wasting his time fighting guys like Bellew and Karpency. Those aren’t acceptable opponents if you’re trying to make a name for yourself on the world stage. That’s limited domestic level stuff that Cleverly should got out of his system years ago.

Okay, so Cleverly had better step it up after the Hawk gimme fight because he’s going to be laughed at in a major way by boxing fans if he keeps fighting soft record padding touches after this Saturday’s mismatch against Hawk. If Cleverly doesn’t step it up he likely won’t get his fights televised in the U.S by the major cable cable networks because their job is to put interesting fights on for their fans in America and frankly Cleverly’s fight against Hawk doesn’t meet that standard.