Canelo Alvarez says the sanctioning bodies will not tell him what to do at this point in his career. He feels that the titles do little to make a fighter a superstar, and he’s 100% right.
Too Many Belts
Each weight division is too watered down with world titles and interim belts, confusing fans and making it less prestigious to hold a world title now. It’s easy for fighters to capture titles or get in position to fight for them as mandatory, especially if they have a slick promoter pulling the strings for them with their calculated matchmaking.
The IBF wanted unified super middleweight champion Canelo (61-2-2, 39 KOs) to defend against their appointed mandatory William Scull, an obscure fighter who fans have heard of. Not surprisingly, Canelo wasn’t interested and ended up losing his IBF title, but he’s not worried about it.
The Prevalence of Unworthy Contenders
The little-known Scull is just one example of a sanctioning body picking out a contender with little experience against notable high-level opposition for Canelo to defend his title against. Another example is Canelo’s current WBA mandatory Edgar Berlanga, a fighter with wins over feeble opposition and a manufactured 22-0 record.
Berlanga is no different than Scull because he has not gone through the gauntlet of talented fighters at 168 to earn the mandatory spot he holds with the WBA. If this were the 1950s, Berlanga would have had to fight killers to get to a fight against Canelo.
We’re talking about these guys: David Benavidez, David Morrell, Christian Mbilli, Diego Pacheco, and Caleb Plant.
“There are levels. There are stars, and there are superstars. They make the championship, not the championship makes them,” said Canelo Alvarez to the Million Dollaz Worth of Game YouTube channel, talking about titles not making a fighter a star in boxing.
There are many champions in boxing, and the vast majority have few fans and will never be superstars. The problem is there are too many sanctioning bodies, and it’s easier to win a world title now without ever fighting quality opposition than it used to be in the past.
The Need for a Unified Ranking System
For boxing to improve, the four sanctioning bodies need to be marginalized and ignored by fans. There should be only one ranking entity with one champion per weight class.
With one champion per weight class, fighters would need to overcome a minefield of talented opposition to hold a world title, and when they finally did accomplish that, they would be more popular.
“Who is William Scull? I never hear about him. I’m not going to do whatever they [IBF] want. I’m going to do whatever I want because I deserve it, because of all I have done,” said Canelo, reacting to being stripped of his IBF super middleweight title by the International Boxing Federation for failing to defend against his little-known mandatory challenger William Scull.
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