By Cliff Rold

The best division in boxing has a calendar that doesn’t live up to it (so far) for the first half of 2008.  That’s not to say that the top Welterweights don’t have plans for that time period.  They just aren’t the sort of plans that can put fans on the edge of their seats in the days leading to a fight. 

The World Welterweight champion (Floyd Mayweather) is taking a vacation while tentatively scheduled for some expensive sparring in September.  Its number one contender (Miguel Cotto) is fighting someone from The Contender (Alphonso Gomez).

The best fight booked so far is a re-run of a five round blowout (Antonio Margarito-Kermit Cintron) that is more commendable for Cintron’s willingness to take it than it is for its expected merits.  That the winner of Cintron-Margarito II is likely to face Cotto later in the year is reason for excitement but a long stretch down the road from happening just yet. 

The remaining match-ups aren’t much better. 

There could be a solution.  Currently, two of the division’s most bankable names have empty dance cards.  Dancing together, they could provide a quality passage of the time until the division moves on from the current calendar lull.

Shane Mosley.  Zab Judah.  Why not?

I touched on the idea briefly in a piece earlier this week and, between marathon sessions to catch up on the last season of Brotherhood, have continued to come back to it.  Mosley-Judah makes a lot of sense.

How so?  There are three reasons I can think of for this fight to move from the speculation of this page to the pages of a contract.

1) Money: Since we live in an age where fans are asked all too often to be accountants, this one comes first.  Mosley (44-5, 37 KO) and Judah (36-5, 25 KO) both have amassed substantial fan followings throughout their careers and each has been a part of rich pay-per-view business.  Besides his windfalls with Oscar De La Hoya, Mosley drew strong with both Cotto and Fernando Vargas.  Judah has headlined in two profitable pay-per-view shows, against Mayweather and Cotto. 

While neither Mosley nor Judah acted as the A-sides to those shows, the idea of two strong B-sides making for an A-draw isn’t unheard of.  Bernard Hopkins-Winky Wright did over $15 million dollars in television revenue last year with a fight that promised less action than a Mosley-Judah bout would provide.   

That’s assuming the fight has to be on pay-per-view.  With all the talk of Golden Boy Promotions trying to reach out to the everyday fan, Team Oscar could always find a way to underwrite this bout for the undercard of Oscar’s May HBO show.  It’s not a likely scenario, but it is one that could have a strong back-end pay off with a Mosley win as it would put Mosley fresh in the minds of potentially the largest live HBO audience in years.  Either way, there’s no reason to think that Mosley-Judah wouldn’t be a solid pay check for both men. 

There are other reasons this match-up could be wise thinking that go beyond the dollar.

2) Position: Weak first-half schedule or not, Welterweight remains for the moment boxing’s deepest and most vital division.  That means an impetus on getting oneself into position for the biggest fights and paydays.  Mosley and Judah, in terms of most recent major outing, left the ring with an extra “L” on their record thanks to Cotto.  To their credit, each got that result by way of a Fight of the Year candidate.  That doesn’t mean both couldn’t use a high-profile win.

It isn’t often that a division can be deep enough to have two of its former legitimate World champions be still near the top of their game and forced to scramble to stay relevant.  That is the case with Mosley and Judah, who threaten to be overwhelmed this year by the greater attention that will go to their conqueror and the long build to Mayweather Beats De La Hoya II.  While some reports have had Mosley looking to Ricardo Mayorga, that fight simply wouldn’t be as credible as Mosley-Judah; and Judah, who for whatever reason missed out on an Antonio Margarito fight, would have a bout that could further his cause far more than a possible win over Margarito fight.

3) Why Not?:  The third reason isn’t really a reason as much as a declaration of the obvious in summation of the above.  Two boxing stars have nothing better to do right now than fight each other.  It pays and it puts the winner in play.  Most important, it provides Welterweight with a legitimate marquee match-up where none exists in the first half of the year.

And the division shouldn’t have six months without a marquee match right now.  Yes, boxing’s battle for TV dates makes it difficult to get top fighters in the ring as often as ‘the old days.’  However, the depth of talent at 147 lbs. is such that the only way to explain the lack of red meat booked so far is that the division is in a holding pattern.  There is nothing worse for the sport than when promoters and managers start making fights to hold an economic slot or are forced to make fights because they can’t get better. 

Most of the fights that have been made thus far in the division all smack of advertisements that may or may not pay off in the Fall or, shudder to think, next year.  As noted, Cintron-Margarito II is an exception but not one notable enough to stand out as maintaining the division’s momentum on its own.

Only something like Shane Mosley-Zab Judah could do that.  It makes so much sense that only in boxing would it not have come up yet. 

Cliff’s Notes…

It’s not a particularly heavy week inside the ring but there’s plenty going in it, and outside of it to leave lots of room for conversation.  If you missed anything, follow the links for thoughts on:

Cliff Rold is a member of the Ring Magazine Ratings Advisory Panel and the Boxing Writers Association of America.  He can be reached at roldboxing@hotmail.com