Do you care about world title belts anymore?

That's part of the pull but it has to all lead somewhere. We all love our Gattis but people want to see the Jordans and Woods of every sport. There needs to be an architecture to decide who that person is.

If it's just mano o mano, then we should all just watch bum fights and not make these people millionaires. The reality is we are looking for pugilist specialists and when you get to the top, the only way to define who is the pugilist specialist is competition. As boxing has very little actual designed (not corrupt) competition, there's A LOT of opinions and as they say opinions are like a***holes!

 

That is one aspect no doubt. But it is not the be all and end all. The casual fan may watch Lil Floyd and Pacman, but will not go to the local hall and watch two honest journeymen give it a go for six rounds.

The Journeymen who are the lifeblood of the sport. The fighters who steps in last minute to save a bill; without them acts Lil Floyd has no sport to make a fortune off.

 

Of course, it's not an all encompassing rule. Boxing in it's most simplest form is two men competing to win. People will always enjoy that. I'm merely touching on the end game and I think what keeps this machine (called boxing) going is to be the best.

Floyd's used it as his slogan TBE and made a lot of money off of it. Finally, I think that's why fans are such morons and are so obsessed with the BS '0'/invincibility.

 

I am in total agreement with that!

 

The proliferation of the belts are the major reasons why the sport is struggling globally at the moment. Combine that with promoters/networks refusing to work together and the issues are obvious. To be fair having one sole organisation can lead to to corruption as well but anything is better than the current situation. I have never seen the belts mean so little. Whilst watching Sky's review of the year I was cringing when McCrory, Smith and Ed Robinson were saying how the sport was prospering. Understandably that is from a British prospective having a record number of belt holders. However, I think this is partially attributed to an increasing lack of interest from the US as well as a number of other factors (interest off the back of the Olympics for example).

The fact is the sport has no structure whatsover. The marquee fighters are making up their own catch weights and seemingly avoiding the challenges in their respective division at will. All of this would be removed if there was one unified champion in each division.

From a UK perspective, its actually killing the domestic scene. Take lightweight for example, you have Burns, Campbell, Crolla, Mitchell, Flanagan, Matthews, Coyle and Cardle. In the last couple of years only Coyle and Campbell have fought. These guys should be in with each other for British and European belts in mouth watering fights and the winner moves on to World level. However, we have Hearn/****** steering them up their own individual World routes picking up fake belts before contesting interim/regular titles. If fighters do become unstuck it is more by accident than good matchmaking (take Campbell and Mitchell's losses as a case in point). Hearn is guilty of this especially. He wants nothing to do with the British belt and this was seen with the Eubank/Blackwell purse bids nonsense. Hopefully, Channel 5 will run with that as it should be a cracking fight with actual meaning behind it. I really think they would do huge numbers if promoted correctly as Eubank is a draw.

Its killing the game from the fans perspective. Sometimes I can't even be bothered with it anymore.