Moving up in weight is a sign of boxer laziness

If I missed it, my bad.

 

Yeah I am of the mind that Crawford cleared out 135, 140, and 147. I feel Haney moving up to 140 was to avoid Tank and Stevenson.

 

Practically nobody really "moves up" in weight these days. They just don't dry out as much as they previously did.

I was watching a replay of the Bud Crawford-Felix Diaz 140-pound title fight. They said both weighed in the day of the fight at middleweight. Hell, Diaz weighed in at 161 ... he didn't even "make" the middleweight limit.

Antonio Cervantes never weighed 161 for a 140-pound title fight.

Fighters and champions compete in so many divisions now, because the weigh-ins are 30 hours or more before the fights.

Former 135-pound champ and current 140-pound champ Devin Haney is a middleweight when the bell rings.

If they moved weigh-ins back to the afternoon of the actual fight, essentially every title in every organization below cruiserweight would become vacant.

It's not laziness. It's guys cheating the system, trying to win belts in the lightest weights possible to gain an advantage.

Practically none of them could actually step in the ring and compete for 12 rounds in the emaciated condition most show up for the weigh-ins.

And it's been going on for a couple decades now.

 

I guess th

I guess that makes Manny the laziest fighter in history.

 

Exactly.

And for "safety" reasons they're not going to move back to weigh-ins on the day...
You can argue that if they did, then fighters would be more careful about boiling down quite so much, but that seems not to be an argument that gets much traction.

I don't see any reason why we couldn't do both, though...

Weigh-in as now for whether the fight goes ahead.
Weigh-in on the day with consequences afterwards - if more than a few pounds over, ban from competing at the weight again and force a move to a higher category.


Heck, why not just ban fighters from going DOWN a weight category fullstop?
Once you fight at a given weight, you can't go back down - would fix some of the problem straight away.


The biggest problem, of course, is getting any of the orgs to actually do it... Let alone all of them.

 

Not when it comes to Inoue. He epitomizes challenge which is what moving up in weight should be