Juiseppe Angelo Cusumano vs. Brendan Barrett for NBA HW title (vacant since Walcott vs. Charles III)

Somehow, a week from Saturday, a domestic clash between American heavyweight prospects, neither of them ranked in any major sanctioning org's top 40 (and respectively #28 in the US/#146 in the world and #77 in the US/#278 in the world) has been slated as the resurrection of the National Boxing Association heavyweight championship of the world.

Its lineage goes: Dempsey, Tunney, Schmeling, Sharkey, Carnera, Baer, Braddock, Louis, Charles, Walcott. And there it ends, with just ten names, all but maybe two regarded as era-transcendent All Time Greats...one bearer perhaps the greatest heavyweight of all time, depending on who you ask, while another stood as the most famous destroyer in the division's history until Mike Tyson (himself a studious boxing historian & raging Dempsey fan-boy) came along. Now there will be an eleventh name added onto that ledger, and it will be that of Cusumano (whose best result to date is a blitz of fat glass cannon Michael Marrone, riding a skid of six consecutive early KO losses..) or that of 37 year old MMA crossover Barrett (who is 10-8-1 in his native discipline).

How did this happen? By what authority did somebody make this "official"? Why revive a lineage that has sat undisturbed for 68 years? They could have just made up some regional or even national-level bauble for Cusumano and Barrett to battle over. Now, however, posterity will have to recognize them in a continuation of the legacy of that immortalized ten - of whom seven or eight are legends.

This is a slap in the face especially of The Cincinnati Cobra, since Ezzard contested the belt more than any of its other aspirants combined, going 9-1 in matches with it on the line.

 

...and yes, those are their actual cringe-worthy, self-selected nicknames.

 

Oh, and to pour salt on the wound, it will be an 8-rounder.

And not even the main event. It places lower on the marquee than a vacant WBC Youth lightweight title bout, plus a non-title women's bout...also both 8-rounders.

 

@PinoyProdigy you need to have a word with one of your colleagues if this was really a matter of them not doing their due diligence to determine whether or not this was indeed being sanctioned as a continuation of the long-defunct NBA lineage before publishing such information.

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No longer listed as being for the resurrected NBA title; not sure if they originally had planned to bill it as such and changed their minds or if this was simply a transcription error on the part of a BoxRec editor - but either way, thank goodness for that!