By Scott Gilfoid: James DeGale (20-1, 14 KOs), an Olympic Gold medalist from Britain from the 2008 Olympics, believes he’s going to be Britain’s first Olympic gold medalist to go on and win a world title when he battles for the vacant IBF super middleweight title on April 25th.
DeGale has a good chance of accomplishing that goal if he faces someone like #3 IBF Gilberto Ramirez, #4 IBF George Groves or #5 IBF Julius Jackson. It wouldn’t be a lock for DeGale to beat those guys, but I think he would have a better than average chance of out-boxing them in the UK and picking up the vacant IBF strap.
Where I do think DeGale will struggle and fail is if he faces #2 IBF Andre Dirrell, who DeGale’s promoter Eddie Hearn is currently in negotiations with to face DeGale on the 4/25 date. If that fight takes place then I don’t think it’s going to go well for DeGale, but let’s see if the fight actually takes place.
Dirrell will get a 50-50 deal to face DeGale. I can’t see Dirrell agreeing to fight DeGale in the UK though, but if it goes to purse bids, Dirrell’s promoters might win the bid so that the fight can be staged in the U.S. Dirrell’s manager is Al Haymon.
“I’m making history. I’m going to be the first British Olympic gold medalist to win a world title,” DeGale said via Skysports.com.
DeGale wanted to fight former IBF 168lb champion Carl Froch, but he decided to vacate the belt because he was injured and had run out of time. Froch also wanted to fight Julio Cesar Chavez Jr rather than DeGale, because Froch rightly or wrongly believes this fight will be a pay-per-view bout in the United States. Whether it will be or not is open to question.
It would be sad if Froch chose to walk away from a potentially better paying bout against DeGale because he made the mistake of overestimating the interest in his fight against Chavez Jr. Maybe that fight does well on British pay-per-view, but it’s hard to imagine it doing well in the U.S, unless Froch’s standards for doing well are in the 50,000 buy category. I can’t see it hitting 100,000 PPV buys in America, and obviously not in the 500,000 to 1 million category like we see with the big PPV stars in the States like Floyd Mayweather Jr and Manny Pacquiao.
DeGale captured a gold medal in the 2008 Olympics by beating the following fighters: Mohamed Hikal, Shawn Estrada, Bakhtiyar Artayev, Darren Sutherland, and Emilio Correa Jr. Winning a gold medal can sometimes be a big deal if the fighter faces a bunch of talented guys that someday move on to be big time players themselves. But in this case, I don’t see any of them having done anything of note in professional boxing world. As such, DeGale’s victory over this bunch doesn’t automatically mean that DeGale is going to be a world champion. It just means he beat a bunch of guys that haven’t done much as a pro.
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