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By Lyle Fitzsimmons - And here’s where it might just get interesting… finally.
Seeing how Bermane Stiverne has officially re-deposited Chris Arreola at the back of the heavyweight championship contenders line, the new World Boxing Council champion can go ahead and concentrate on what everyone now hopes will be an eventual summit meeting of large men.
For the five-or-so years in which the ***eled green belt was being held hostage by Wladimir Klitschko’s older, slightly more politically inclined sibling, the concept of an undisputed champion was left to the fantastical notion that two tightly-knit brothers would punch each other in the face for money.
Short of that impossibility, the heavyweights became little more than a faceless assembly line of wannabes – some shaped like superheroes, and others like, well… Arreola – trudging in for what typically amounted to a one-sided beatdown in exchange for a central European vacation.
Now that the landscape has changed, though, we can hope for a little more.
Had Arreola won Saturday, his knee-jerk claims of divisional supremacy would have been muted by the reality that the elder Klitschko bludgeoned him into a 10-round stoppage in 2009 and his subsequent wins had come against the decidedly un-Canastota likes of Brian Minto, Joey Abell and Seth Mitchell.
That’s not to say that the 22 men Stiverne has beaten alongside Arreola are anything adjacent to the Norton, Foreman, Frazier neighborhood – in fact, they’re preposterously far from it – but at least any claims he makes about being the best in the world will be novel, if not particularly sensible. [Click Here To Read More]
Seeing how Bermane Stiverne has officially re-deposited Chris Arreola at the back of the heavyweight championship contenders line, the new World Boxing Council champion can go ahead and concentrate on what everyone now hopes will be an eventual summit meeting of large men.
For the five-or-so years in which the ***eled green belt was being held hostage by Wladimir Klitschko’s older, slightly more politically inclined sibling, the concept of an undisputed champion was left to the fantastical notion that two tightly-knit brothers would punch each other in the face for money.
Short of that impossibility, the heavyweights became little more than a faceless assembly line of wannabes – some shaped like superheroes, and others like, well… Arreola – trudging in for what typically amounted to a one-sided beatdown in exchange for a central European vacation.
Now that the landscape has changed, though, we can hope for a little more.
Had Arreola won Saturday, his knee-jerk claims of divisional supremacy would have been muted by the reality that the elder Klitschko bludgeoned him into a 10-round stoppage in 2009 and his subsequent wins had come against the decidedly un-Canastota likes of Brian Minto, Joey Abell and Seth Mitchell.
That’s not to say that the 22 men Stiverne has beaten alongside Arreola are anything adjacent to the Norton, Foreman, Frazier neighborhood – in fact, they’re preposterously far from it – but at least any claims he makes about being the best in the world will be novel, if not particularly sensible. [Click Here To Read More]
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