Should titles be allowed to be fought for at catchweights?

Clearly that logic doesn't apply to everything. You're not considering the reason why it's important to address weight specifically. Weight affects your performance and your health. Making unreasonable financial demands is a world of difference from attempting to physically weaken a fighter and compromise his health in clear contradiction of the organization's weight limits.

There aren't established monetary classes in boxing - there are weight classes. That's the difference between imposing restrictions on financial splits and imposing restrictions on weight. Your point would only be valid in the absence of established weight classes.

 

They don't pay for them, but they sanction them. I'm not arguing that catchweight fights shouldn't happen. I am arguing that they should go unsanctioned by the title organizations. If they want to fight for a $40 million dollar purse, great. But it should be for a $40 million purse AND a title. Organizations can't control the former, but they can and should control the latter.

 

I'm not sure what your point is here, but it's a faulty example. Obviously you can't reasonably establish rules preventing fighters from moving up and down divisions to fight in specific divisions. But you can have rules that prevent people from making rules that contradict your own. What's so "bollocks" about that?

You assume too much. Actually, I would love to see the end of catch weight fights altogether. I specifically proposed title fights because of the increased power and leverage afforded to champions as well as the increased leverage a sanctioning body has when it can remove title contention. My original point, if you recall, was in reponse to the potential for abuse by champions of their station - their ability to use their status as a champion to artifically alter the weight limit beyond what the established limit is by the belt's patron.

The end goal for every fighter is to become a champion. The potential of a champion attempting to use the belt as a means of changing the weight class is far more easily abused than any other method of manipulating stipulations. Yes, even moreso than money because there are more champions than multi-multi millionaires in boxing.

As for your other ideas, those are fine too. But that's also utterly and completely beside the point of what we're discussing, which is should sanctioning bodies adopt a rule banning champions from adding weight stipulations as a condition for fighting for their title.

 

No, it's not. If a sanctioning body rules specify a maximum weight for a weight class, and a boxer says that another fighter is limited to a weight lower than the sanctioning body's weight limit, then it's clearly contradicting their rules. There's no two ways about that. By putting a limit of 144lbs for a welterweight fight, you're *excluding* all the fighters who weight 145, 146 and 147lbs, which happens to be about 95% of welterweights.