The alphabet soup nightmare of boxing titles
Wednesday 25 August is Dan Rafael’s 40th birthday. For the occasion, he posted an entry on his blog glossing over 40 wishes he’d like to see from professional boxing in the upcoming year. The list was full of theoretical and hopeful goodies, but wish number three takes the cake with its upfront simple demand: “fewer titles.”
The criticism that professional boxing is a sport with way too many titles is often levelled, and probably with good reason. People can’t understand how there can be so many “world champions,” let alone how the concept can exist in the murky waters of champion-ville, where there’s generally four sanctioned champions in any division (WBA, WBC, WBO, IBF). This isn’t even to mention the other four fringe bodies (NABF, WBF, IBO, WBU). Taken altogether, that means that in boxing today there can hypothetically be 95 “world champions” at any time (17 weight divisions x 8 sanctioning bodies).
In the old days, people appreciated that Joe Louis or Rocky Marciano were the one and only “champion” of their division. Many have argued that because that isn’t the case at all today, talent is all mucked-up and that it will never be possible to compare current champs with former ones. Analysts have also argued that more belts devalues the real stars of the sport, as someone with as little as 12 successful victories can fight for a title and win it.
Not only does it devalue real stars, but it upgrades lower competition—meaning it isn’t uncommon to see a star like Joe Calzaghe take on Joe Nobody, and seriously hand him a whooping. These guys are arguably way out-classed and could even get hurt in a fight, but are only there due to formal belt determinations, which today don’t always amount to given talent or experience.
Historically, the first and still most prominent title was and is the WBA title, which started in the twenties as the NBA (National Boxing Association). In the sixties, the NBA started allowing foreign boxing commissions to have seats on the governing table, but American monopolization was still too intact to create fairness, so splits almost immediately occurred. Bodies like the WBC and IBF were born.
With more titles comes more complication. Not only are there tons of titles today; there’s tons of criterion for what qualifies as a legitimate titleholder. Take the WBA for instance. Today, there is the unofficial but nevertheless held-up distinction of a ‘true’ champion and a titleholder in the WBA. A titleholder is someone who has the title. But a legitimate WBA champ is someone who has made five to ten defenses of it. In this case, one can be called a ‘unified’ champion. As well, if a WBA titleholder manages to win another sanctioning body title, he is immediately elevated to being a unified champ. These are only a few of the current rules or customs out there governing titles.
The debate is even interesting on the linguistic level. Most analysts today, when discussing boxing champions, don’t refer to them as champions. They’re referred to as ‘titlists.’ You’ll notice the political correctness, and hence the politics secretly stored in this term. By calling a fighter a titlist, you’re calling them precisely that, but not committing to calling them a ‘champion.’ Today, the former is definitely the more accurate term.
But when is it justifiable to call someone a champion? Whereas in former times it was always justifiable if they won the title, today the opposite is true. Due to the many fractured sanctioning bodies, it’s never justifiable because you always have more or other champions. The old democratic paradox and adage holds true here: “if everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody.”
There's not much that can be done at present. Sanctioning bodies have their own money to make and reputation to build. What's become the most coveted disctinction in the sport is a Ring magazine title, which is a title that is named and given to a fighter. There's a reason it's coveted- there's a theoretical maximum of 17, one for each weight class. But even then there's only six that have been handed out. So when a Ring title is given out, it means something.
Maybe that's something the alphabet soup of sanctioning bodies should pay attention to.
Tags: