By Shaun Ayres: Boxing fans are always the first to complain about certain fighters taking what is perceived to be an easy fight. For example, you will often see in forums everyone complaining about Deontay Wilder, Kell Brook, Amir Khan, Adrien Broner, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, Gennady Golovkin, Sergey Kovalev and so on taking an easy fight against a lesser opponent. The harsh reality is, most of these fighters are built up by their respective promoters to give them an extremely marketable looking record without ever really testing themselves. This is especially true of Deontay Wilder and Kell Brook. Their respective records are only impressive on paper and the closer one scrutinizes their opponents it becomes painfully obvious that their record is mediocre at best.
So I suppose the question is, why do they build their fighters up without testing them in their first 20 to 30 fights? Well there are two short answers here: Firstly, promoters see this as low risk but high reward. As in the case of Wilder, Golden Boy bangs on about 30 fights, 30 wins and 30 knockouts. They want him to be the first 50 fights, 50 wins and 50 knockouts. Based on his current record, if his Calibre of opponents does not improve this would be an insult to all the great Heavyweights who fought at an elite level for so long such as Rocky Marciano who does not deserve to be surpassed by a media, wind milling machine at best.
Secondly, the biggest issue for me is the boxing fans! This will not be a popular point to mention but the fans are heavily responsible for the biggest fights not getting made. Boxing fans love to turn on a loser (with the exception of George Groves), and say “See I said he is rubbish” “I knew as soon as he fought someone in the top 5 he would be knocked out” or “He was always over rated and protected now he should just retire”. This is usually after just one loss. Most boxing fans cannot wait to get on social media and borderline abuse the fighters and have an element of smugness about being “right”. However, if two equally good fighters enter into a 50/50 fight and they have 10 of these 50/50 fights throughout their career, then they are likely to have at least 5 losses on their record. However, in the world of boxing the vast majority of fans will call you a “bum” if you have lost five times. They will not think good on him, he actually fought the best won some and lost some. This is not how other combat sports judge their fighters such as Muay Thai and UFC, it is widely accepted in these sports and is often deemed an invaluable learning curve.
To conclude I honestly believe there needs to be a massive shift in the boxing paradigm and ideology if boxing fans want to see the best fighters fighting each other. The vast majority of fighters should serve an apprenticeship. However, no fighter should be hitting 30 fights with no real scalp on their records of note. Boxing fans can help this by not being so critical of every loss and accepting we all have bad days in the office, or it was a 50/50 fight, the better man won. I would love to see the best fighters fighting each other and not some opponent ranked #50-80 for their 30 something fight.
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