By Tom Donelson
Last July 16th, Jermain Taylor defeated Bernard Hopkins for the undisputed Middleweight championship. His prize for beating Hopkins included the WBO, WBC, IBF and WBA Middleweight championships belts, along with the distinction of being the first fighter to beat Hopkins in over 12 years.
On June 17th of this year, Taylor will fight Ronald "Winky" Wright, the top recognized Middleweight contender. Along the way to his upcoming meeting with Winky Wright, Mr. Taylor has managed to lose two belts, the IBF and WBA, without losing a single fight!
For those interested, German Middleweight Arthur Abraham was rewarded with the IBF’s version of the Middleweight title when he clocked Kingsley Ikeke in five pugilistic rounds. Then Felix Sturm captured the WBA middleweight title by defeating Maselino Masoe, who was granted his title by defeating the previously undefeated and unknown, Evans Ashira.
While these fighters are good fighters in their own right, they have as much right to a title as the common palooka in the street. They were given their title as gifts because Jermian Taylor chose to give Mr. Hopkins a rematch and a chance to set the record straight on who won their initial bout. Knowing that the biggest money fight out of the numerous possible opponents was Wright, Taylor decided to give the Winky a well-deserved shot at the title. Of course the WBA and IBF for reasons unknown, other than possibly needing the extra sanctioning fees, decided to reward Taylor for facing the best fighters in the division was stripping of him of their titles - essentially making them useless trinkets.
The recent events in the Middleweight division simply demonstrate the stupidity in having numerous sanctioning bodies and once again demonstrate the need to revamp the entire system! So what is Taylor to do? First, he has to beat Wright and then eventually get around to unifying the titles, if that is even possible. History has shown that once a unified title breaks up into numerous pieces, it takes several years before the title is unified again.
As for boxing fans, I will make it easy for you. Arthur Abraham and Felix Sturm have shown that they are legitimate contenders but they are not the true champions. Think of Abraham and Sturm as divisional champs, waiting to fight the winner of the Taylor-Wright fight for their version of the Super Bowl.
Sturm is a smooth boxer who showed good accuracy with his punches when he faced Oscar De La Hoya. While I had him winning the fight, the fight was close and Sturm lost due to his cautious fighting style. In that fight, he showed a very effective jab, and used it as his bread and butter punch to connect more often than De La Hoya while only throwing nearly half as many punches. Unfortunately for Sturm, the judges preferred activity over accuracy and Sturm went back to Europe with one loss and no title.
Abraham showed his mettle by beating the tall and rangy Ikeke in easy fashion with a fifth round TKO. This young slugger is a knockout machine with 17 KO's in just 20 victories. And sometime in May, he will defend his divisional championship while waiting on either Mr. Taylor or Mr. Wright to grant him the opportunity to be the real champ. Does that make sense for all concerned?
The Middleweight is becoming a deep division with some young worldwide talent. Abraham and Sturm lead a young pack of young challengers who are all under the age of 30, that includes: Khoren Gevor, Sebastian Sylvester, Scott Dann, and Kelly Pavlik - just to name a few. All of these fighters promises to provide worthy competition to Jermain Taylor’s reign as the Middleweight king and eventually many of these fighters may even move up to Super Middleweight and Light Heavyweight providing boxing fans some memorable duels to look forward to in the future.
Jermain Taylor is the Middleweight champion – period! No questions asked, and ignore whom the various sanctioning bodies are recognizing as “their” champions. There are worthy challengers waiting in the wings to contest for the undisputed king of the Middleweight hill and most of them make their home overseas. Being a challenger or being an "IBF" or "WBA" champion is not the same as being the “recognized” Champion. There is only one true champion at the moment and he resides in Little Rock, Arkansas. Simple enough.
