Was Mike McCallum avoided?

This isn’t completely true: Don Lee made no sense (he was a replacement for Mickey Goodwin, who never beat anyone above journeyman so even if Mickey didn’t get injured in training that fight also made no sense) and Fully Obel II made sense only in the aspect of not getting stripped from the WBA.

And I’d argue Marvin would have been better off binning that title and letting Obel fight Dwight Davison or Hamsho or Scypion (whomever the WBA delegated to meet him for the vacant belt) … and then at the right time set up a unification with the other champion, which would have been more lucrative and interesting than just beating Obel again; a fight literally no one in the world was excited about seeing.

Even so, it’s not a case that McCallum should have stepped in when the Lee and Obel II fights happened — both were in 1982 and McCallum was a rising prospect at the time without real world-class credentials (his first fairly big win came late that year vs. Ayub Kalule. Not to mention McCallum was strictly a junior middle at that time.

Wilfred Benitez, coming off his win over Duran right around this time, would have been a much better option than Obel or Lee. Probably PPV, definitely a more meaningful legacy fight as well as a bigger payday.

 

I think he was too much of a risk for the noise he put out. Meaning had he had the Hector Camacho personality he would have been more marketable and the risk to fight him more profitable.

 

Sure they made more sense than someone who was unknown and had never even fought at MW. Mike getting a title shot at MW in 1982 would be completely ludicrous.

 

Which I expressed I agree with.

But every single defense did not make more sense than some other very real and easily made defenses that could have taken place at the time (Fully Obel II and Caveman Lee in particular).