What once was boxing’s marquee division has crumbled into pieces of failed negotiations, tight-fisted promotion, protective decision-making and barely beyond-anonymous names.
Recent Labor Day weekend events that saw unbeaten IBF welterweight champion Jaron Ennis and his promoter, Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom Boxing, withdraw from unification talks with new WBO champion Brian Norman Jr. have further chilled a division filled exclusively with Terence Crawford’s emailed replacement titlists.
“It’s a symptom of the sport. Guys are not fighting each other … it’s apparently very difficult to make this fight,” former 140-pound champion Chris Algieri said on a Wednesday edition of ProBox TV’s “Top Stories.” “How does that happen? How do these fights not get made?
“We’re in the four-belt, unification era, but we also see guys avoiding guys. We have weight classes full of undefeated fighters and they all have titles.”
Indeed, with the exception of Canelo Alvarez wearing three belts at 168 pounds and Japan’s Naoya Inoue standing as undisputed super-bantamweight champion, every other division between those weight classes offers at least three world champions:
Middleweight (three), 154 pounds (three), welterweight (four), 140 pounds (four), lightweight (four), super-featherweight (four), featherweight (four). There are four bantamweight champions and three champions each at super-flyweight and flyweight.
“We need to have these fighters fight each other,” Algieri said. “Part of it is promotion, part of it is (the stubbornness in) fight camps, part of it is negotiation and market inflation. It’s not just the welterweights. It’s the sport.”
Yet, the case of Ennis (32-0, 29 KOs), a 27-year-old rare, promising talent who has expressed a yearning to clean out his division, is particularly galling.
“I want to collect these belts. I’m just frustrated,” Ennis told YSM Sports Media as talks with Norman proved difficult. “I don’t want to have no backward fights. My whole thing is to be undisputed … my mindset is focused on the WBC, WBO and WBA (belts).”
Instead, new WBO champion Norman (26-0, 20 KOs) and his team felt they were $500,000 apart from a unification deal and opted to make their first title defense under a Keyshawn Davis homecoming fight in Norfolk, Va., Nov. 8 against Puerto Rico’s Derrieck Cuevas (27-1-1, 19 KOs).
That leaves Ennis to decide whether to take a rematch in defending his IBF belt against Ukraine’s Karen Chukhadzhian – whom Ennis previously dominated 120-108 on all three scorecards in January 2023 – or to flee the thinned division and move to 154 pounds.
The decision might have been clinched when Matchroom and Hearn were outbid by $250,000 in the Ennis-Chukhadzhian purse bid, with Chukhadzhian’s P2M Promotions now freed to take the bout to a venue of their choosing as Ennis had planned a Nov. 9 hometown bout in Philadelphia.
“These guys can be stars, but they need their marquee dance partner so we can see how good they are,” Algieri said. “Ennis could easily take over this sport. He’s not getting the fights. People don’t know who he is.”
The two other welterweight champions, WBC’s Mario Barrios and WBA’s Eimantas Stanionis fight under the Premier Boxing Champions banner, and at this point don’t have a fight scheduled.
So the incentive was rich for Hearn to first move to Georgia’s Norman, 23, exchanging the belt for profits.
“Sometimes a promoter has to make that investment … (but) when they sign a champion, they think, ‘I’ll get him opponents, I don’t have to pay him anymore (than a multi-fight deal),” former welterweight champion Paulie Malignaggi said on “Top Stories.” “In this situation, ‘Boots’ could have used a financial injection from Matchroom and Matchroom could have taken a loss just to get the notoriety (of a unification bout). Otherwise, what are you doing for ‘Boots?’”
Malignaggi sought a simple solution to boost the welterweight division’s profile: one card with all four champions fighting: Barrios versus Norman, Ennis versus Stanionis.
“You’d have a welterweight blockbuster. I know, I know: Market value, cross-promotion and network rivalries don’t (allow) these things to happen. But make the damn fights, people will be watching and even the most (casual) of boxing fans will know these are good fighters,” Malignaggi said. “Instead, we’ve got this crap.”
Another former welterweight champion, Timothy Bradley Jr., said Ennis would be wise to flee the rotting welterweight crop and move to 154 pounds, where a slew of impressive fighters including Crawford, unified champion Sebastian Fundora, Vergil Ortiz Jr., Serhii Bohachuk and Tim Tszyu reside.
“There’s nothing for us to do here (at welterweight),” Bradley said.
Bradley explained the Norman camp’s decision how “he knows he’s going to lose (to Ennis)” and wanted to maximize his earnings. Ennis might have been wise to deduct from his own earnings to give Norman what he wanted.
“Eddie Hearn is not in the business to lose money,” Bradley said. “So the fact this (Chukhadzhian) is supposed to be somewhere we don’t know, if I’m ‘Boots’ manager, we’re moving to 154 where guys like to fight.”
Algieri cautioned Ennis will be in deep.
“He’ll be giving up size and he gets hit,” Algieri said. “The guys (at 154) are bigger, heavier, they can punch.”
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