By Norm Frauenheim –
The shuffle continues. It never really ceases, mostly because the pound-for-pound game is only about opinion. It’s noisier than it has been in a while.
Upsets will do that, and there have been plenty in a debate heightened by the biggest one of all – Dmitry Bivol’s upset of consensus No. 1 Canelo Alvarez.
A month later, that stunner is still generating lots of revised ratings, all at the top of the scale. Terence Crawford, Oleksandr Usyk, Naoya Inoue, Tyson Fury. Take your pick. There’s no right or wrong here. No rules either. There’s just chaos.
From this corner, Crawford, still unbeaten, was No. 1 before Bivol-Canelo. Last November, the unbeaten welterweight strengthened his hold on this corner’s mythical No. 1 with a dynamic stoppage of proven Shawn Porter, who retired after the bout.
For Crawford to become the consensus No. 1, however, he still has to beat Errol Spence Jr. Amend that. First, he has to secure a deal, date and place for a showdown with Spence, who has his own pound-for-pound credentials and aspirations. Recently, there’s been a lot of talk that the fight will happen, perhaps later this year. That’s better than all the prior talk that it would never happen. Still, it’s only talk.
Maybe the shuffle at the top of the debate will serve as further motivation for a deal, a definitive fight that should have happened a couple of years ago. The clock is pushing it perilously close to past-due. Crawford will be 35 on Sept. 28; Spence is 32, about 10 months from his next birthday. It’s still a prime-time fight, but it won’t stay in that window much longer.
More urgent, perhaps, are the pound-for-pound contenders who figure to line up – week-after-week, fight-after-fight — for an opportunity to make their own claim on No.1.
Let’s just say it’s vacant and will stay that way for a while.
There’s Inoue, already a consensus top five, who can further his pound-for-pound argument next week (June 7 in Japan) against Nonito Donaire in a rematch (ESPN+) of their 2019 Fight of the Year. Guess here: The entertaining Inoue will do exactly that. Donaire is 40. His resiliency and energy will begin to fail in the later rounds
Then, there’s Usyk, who is already at the top of some ratings. We’ll know soon enough if he belongs there. He’s working toward a summer rematch against Anthony Joshua. He scored a stunner — a decision as unanimous as it was skillful — over the bigger Joshua in September. Guess here: He’ll do it again, this time motivated more than ever to win one for his besieged homeland, the Ukraine.
Still, there was an intriguing addition to Joshua’s corner this week. The UK heavyweight hired Robert Garcia to be his trainer. Maybe, Garcia can restore Joshua’s aggressiveness. He’s been timid, a shell of the fighter who ended Wladimir Klitschko’s career
in April 2017.
Then, there’s Tyson Fury. The unified heavyweight champ says he’s retired. But there are tons of reasons, all fungible, to be skeptical. He just leaves a lot of money on the table if he walks away and stays away. Maybe, he’s waiting on Usyk-Joshua 2. Or, maybe, he’s just trying to distance himself from questions about his relationship with Daniel Kinahan, the alleged Irish gangster with documented links to boxing. US law enforcement is offering a $5 million reward for information that would lead to the arrest and conviction of Kinahan.
Then, there’s still Canelo. The Mexican, boxing’s biggest draw in the post-Floyd Mayweather era, can put himself back in contention and win back the support he had before his unanimous-decision loss to light-heavyweight champion Bivol. But that won’t be easy. Canelo, a golfer, is in the rough. Guess here: To reclaim the top spot, he needs two convincing stoppages, first of 40-year-old Gennadiy Golovkin in September in a super-middleweight bout in their third fight and then in a rematch against Bivol in early 2023.
This argument is just getting started.