By Allan Fox: George ‘Ferocious’ Kambosos Jr doesn’t think too highly of how WBC lightweight belt-holder Devin Haney was given his belt via email from the World Boxing Council in 2019 rather than winning the title inside the ring the way normal fighters do.
Kambosos (19-0, 10 KOs) says if the WBC sent him an email to let him know he was being made an email champion, he’d have deleted it by putting it inside his trash folder.
The IBF mandatory challenger Kambosos Jr, 27, is challenging IBF/WBA/WBC Franchise/WBO 135-lb champion Teofimo Lopez (16-0, 12 KOs) on June 5th on Triller pay-per-view at the Marlins Stadium in Miami. Florida.
Unfortunately, the fight won’t be for the undisputed lightweight championship because Teofimo, 24, is missing the WBC belt, which is in the position of Haney.
Kambosos doesn’t feel that Haney should be the holder of the WB 135-lb title, given that he never fought for the belt. It was just thrown into his lap by the WBC via email.
Kambosos wouldn’t have accepted the WBC title
“Now Devin Haney never fought for the title,” Kambosos Jr told Fighthub in discussing Haney’s status as the WBC 135lb champ. “Never won the belt properly.
“He was an interim champion or a super whatever he was a super champion, and all of a sudden, he got an email, or Gmail or yahoo mail whatever you want to call it and he became a world champion.”
“If that was me, I would have said listen, I’m putting the email in junk and spam and I ain’t accepting that I’m sending it back because I like to earn things,” said Kambosos Jr.
It’s really too bad that Haney had to pick up his WBC belt the way he did because it ruined things for him. After all, he’s viewed as a ‘paper champion.’
The WBC devalued their own 135-lb title in the process when they created the Franchise title for the lightweight division.
Haney’s promoter Eddie Hearn isn’t happy with how he didn’t get a chance to capture the WBC title traditionally by taking on Vasily Lomachenko when he held the 135-lb title.
At the same time that the WBC made Haney their email/regular champion at lightweight, they gave Lomachenko the Franchise tag.
It’s unclear whether you can call that a higher status belt because it’s one that’s given out by the WBC to fighters they like rather than one won during a fight.
Lomachenko lost his Franchise title to Teofimo last October, and now he’s the holder of the belt.
However, Haney is the one with the real belt, but it’s a title that is now undervalued because it’s secondary below the one that Teofimo holds.
No, how badly Kambosos might want to become the undisputed champion, he can’t do it unless he beats both Teofimo and Haney because the WBC titles are fragmented.
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