They are now into full blown -scandalous in your face we don't give a sh-t about the intregity of boxing- type corruption. Fightnews just announced on the undercard of a sebastian zbik's fight is an "attractive" bout for the WBA supermiddleweight championship between it's champion ( not regular, or interim, but full champion ) dimitri sartison, and koren ghevor( of middleweight fame ) Now, I do remember that if a WBA belt holder holds its title and another of the ABC titles at the same time then they are elevated to "super" champion status. Yeah, we fans all got that bull**** and adhered, eh to it. Well, we just dealt with it and moved on with our lives. Nonetheless, that was the new protocol with the WBA. However, i'm 100% certain that who i thought was the sole titlist, mr andre ward, held and only held the WBA title and nothing else. So, ward is just the holder of the WBA title which he earned in the ring with a win over the former legitamate WBA champ, mikkel kessler. So, how in ****all's name are we going to be led to beleive that there is, on the other side of the planet, another title fight at the same weight for the very same title. THe WBA can now collect the same exact sanctioning fees at the same exact weight twice. I know, i know that all of these ABC organizations have always been a joke, but this should be held at a regard of criminal activity. The WBA has to be considered now much worse than the IBF, WBC, or the WBO. First with the valuev/chagaev scheme, and now this debacle. I'm embarrased sometimes to be a boxing fan.
They've been doing this for a while. In fact, this is a defense for Sartison. Think this is bad, check featherweight, where John is super champ, Gamboa is regular champ, Caballero is interim champ, and PDL is mandatory. Four different people they're collecting fees from.
the wba and wbc keep reaching new levels of terrible interim champs, silver belts, anything they can take a sanctioning fee on they will we really need to find some way to get rid of these alphabet soup organizations once and for all
The only way they'll go away is if fighters stop paying the sanctioning fees, which isn't going to happen because for many of these the paper title is the only thing keeping their names the least bit profitable. That is why once people are known champions they end up just dropping the bull**** titles all together.
So they have a super champ who isn't a unified champ, and a regular champ who is scheduled to unify in Sept.? Despite having two healthy champs, they have an interim champ? And despite having an interim champ, they also have a mando? I think these orgs are running into major financial issues.
That's what i've been thinking. The only thing is, if these letter organizations collapse, what will replace them? What is the ideal replacement?
Ward is the full "super" champ Sartison is the minor "regular" champ Sartison vs Gevor sounds like a solid fight actually. all sanction bodies are just there to rip off the fighters the sad thing is that the majority of boxing fans still take care about that **** the boxer makes the belt and not the other way round
I am not surprised by this. This goes along what the WBC is doing now with the Silver, Gold, Diamond belts...its just an excuse to charge more fees. So you can have a Diamond belt champion like Pacquiao at 140, but there could be a Gold, Silver, and probably down the road Bronze champion on top of the regular champion and interim, etc etc etc...this is a disgrace to Boxing and more fighters should stop paying fees.
I think that casual fans need to have fights with belts on the line to be interesting. But the problem is that it start to get hard to understand for them, with all these organizations and champion belt, regular belt, etc. I dont think that the casual can follow all this, so in the long term, it will hurt them with both the hard core fans and the casual.
Agreed 100%. The thing is - some people in here were calling Floyd a greedy ******* for refusing to pay the WBA a % of his purse for the Mosley fight atsch Whatever his motivation (obviously financial) it was the right call - more fighters should follow the same principle. What % of a purse is the sanctioning fee? I'd guess he was on around $25m for the fight, so a 3% ''fee'' would be the best part of a million dollars - complete and utter BS if you ask me.
Here's another problem: Championship fights used to be special and worth paying attention to. Now that every fight seems to have a belt involved, it's hard for the sporting world to know which fights are special and which just involve some crappy belt. All the world title talk turns into white noise and boxing is the worse for it.
You know what would be great? Actually getting the guys who are making these random bull**** titles and questioning them on there reasoning behind the legitimacy of having so many titles. They're validity as an organisation is in the dumps. There efforts at corruption aren't even remotely being disguised and not only is it a disgrace it will also ultimately be the demise of boxing if something isn't done about it.
