In the latest effort to sabotage all the work it took to create an undisputed champion, unbeaten, four-belt light heavyweight champion Artur Beterbiev learned Wednesday that he faces a mandatory fight with an obscure opponent or risks being stripped of his International Boxing Federation strap.
Less than 100 hours removed from his stirring majority decision triumph over then-unbeaten WBA champion and Russian countryman Dmitry Bivol, Beterbiev, 21-0 (20 KOs), was informed that he’s on the hook to fight little-known Michael Eifert, 13-1 (5 KOs), of Germany.
The obvious question is one that a representative of Beterbiev promoter Top Rank asked Wednesday: “Who’s Michael Eifert?”
Despite Bivol’s appeal for an immediate rematch and the light heavyweight presence of unbeatens David Benavidez and David Morrell Jr. and the WBO’s top-ranked contender Anthony Yarde, Eifert, 26, found his way to the top of the IBF ratings by defeating an aged Jean Pascal by unanimous decision in March 2023 and then scoring a second-round TKO of lesser-known Carlos Eduardo Jimenez, 13-6 (12 KOs), in August.
Consider all the wondrous options before Beterbiev, 39, at this hour: a Bivol rematch, the winner of the early 2025 Benavidez-Morrell bout or even a showdown with recently undisputed super middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez.
Top Rank Chairman Bob Arum said he seeks to conduct a dinner meeting in December with Alvarez trainer-manager Eddy Reynoso when Reynoso and Alvarez are expected to attend the Dec. 7 WBO junior lightweight title fight of Reynoso-trained Oscar Valdez in Phoenix.
“We look at Eddy Reynoso and Canelo as friends … I want to sit down and have a meal with them and broach the subject,” Arum told BoxingScene on Wednesday.
At this hour, unbeaten former super middleweight titleholder Benavidez, 29-0 (24 KOs), is WBC interim light heavyweight champion and also stands as that organization’s mandatory for Beterbiev.
The IBF is professing Eifert is the first-in-line mandatory, again casting the organization as the saboteur of an undisputed champion after earlier this year ruling that Daniel Dubois had the ability to replace unbeaten undisputed heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk days after Usyk’s thrilling win in Saudi Arabia over Tyson Fury.
The IBF then stripped Alvarez for not fighting his little-known mandatory William Scull, who was given the belt and defends it for the first time Saturday in Germany against Russia’s Vladimir Shishkin – a fight so uncompelling that it’s not being streamed/televised in the U.S.
“These organizations are really destroying the sport by not allowing the fighters to remain undisputed. It’s really sad,” Arum said. “The IBF, in particular, gets carried away with itself.
“All of these organizations should sit down together after an undisputed title fight and figure out whom the champion should fight next. And honestly, after becoming undisputed, that fighter should be able to fight whomever he pleases.”
Top Rank President Todd DuBoef reminded that his company has worked diligently to move its fighters toward undisputed position among the four sanctioning bodies – the IBF, WBC, WBO and WBA.
The list includes Terence Crawford, Josh Taylor, Devin Haney, Fury (who lost) and now Beterbiev. All of those reigns were short-lived because of mandatory obligations.
“There’s the good and the bad to it – you bring all the belts together (hearing ‘unify, unify, unify’) and then you find it so hard to keep them (hearing ‘mandatory, mandatory, mandatory’),” DuBoef said. “It becomes an impossible position to defend.”
DuBoef said it will be Beterbiev’s decision as to how he’ll proceed, that he deserves time to properly savor the biggest victory of his career before prematurely rushing to decide whether he wants to meet Eifert – whom he would likely flatten inside five rounds – or pursue the big fish of the division while likely being forced to toss the IBF belt in the waste bin for doing so.
“We can only offer him the opportunities in front of him, [reminding] it’s great to be undisputed, but hard. You win, then you have to peel off the titles,” DuBoef said. “You set the fighter on this path toward becoming undisputed, and then you have to work to hold that path without it getting splintered.”
DuBoef likened the situation to soccer, where many great athletes participate in several different leagues across the globe.
The best way to settle who’s best is the World Cup, which happens only every four years.
Maybe it’s the same thing in the legacy sport of boxing – if we can achieve an undisputed champion in every division once every four years, that’s the best we can hope for.
The IBF’s penchant for enforcing its mandatory fights is linked to a past corruption scandal involving its former president Robert Lee and Arum.
By the IBF not adhering closely to its mandatory rules, it can prompt a wronged fighter and his handlers/legal team to make a hair-trigger move toward litigation – a pricey episode that the New Jersey-based IBF clearly wants no part of.
But as we’ve seen with the emergence of mandatory contenders such as Scull and Eifert, the IBF ratings are ripe for manipulation with rules that are “antiquated,” according to a veteran boxing official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of their frequent IBF dealings.
Arum raised a sound point: While mandatory rules can apply to non-unified IBF champions, they should not apply to undisputed champions who have proven they are a rare breed and have accomplished what the point of the game is: to stand as king of the hill of their given division.
“The WBO and WBC, and even the WBA, have all been terrific on this subject. … They understand what it means to be undisputed,” Arum said. “Artur shouldn’t have to be thinking about jerking around with this German guy he’ll knock out in two rounds. … He has far more lucrative fights to get to, and he’ll fight anybody.”
Lance Pugmire is BoxingScene’s senior U.S. writer and an assistant producer for ProBox TV. Pugmire has covered boxing since the early 2000s, first at the Los Angeles Times and then at The Athletic and USA Today. He won the Boxing Writers’ Association of America’s Nat Fleischer Award in 2022 for career excellence.
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