The WBA have broken their promise to boxing fans and continue to create superfluous world titles – talkSPORT opinion
Six months ago I wrote an open letter to WBA president Gilberto Mendoza and, surprisingly, received a response.
In this letter I criticised the WBA’s sanctioning of Tyron Zeuge v Paul Smith for their ‘regular’ super-middleweight title, but ended on a positive note, praising them for their promise to scrap all of their secondary titles in the long term.
On a podcast less than a week later, Mendoza discussed my letter and admitted the WBA had made a mistake in ranking Smith so highly. He also publicly reiterated his promise regarding the WBA’s secondary titles.
In these exchanges, I found Mendoza to be honest, decent and respectful. I don’t know the man, but I like what I encountered.
This is why it’s since been so sad to see him and his organisation breaking their word on multiple occasions.
For those unaware, the WBA have become a pariah among the four boxing sanctioning bodies in recent years due to their invention of secondary ‘regular’ world titles. Boxing fans are already frustrated with the fact that we have four organisations and four titles, but the WBA decided to then create an additional title within their own organisation!
They have the WBA ‘super’ champion (widely recognised as the real champion) and the WBA ‘regular’ champion (not considered a genuine champion by many observers).
Boxing fans rejoiced when Gilberto Mendoza set out his plan to finally scrap these secondary ‘regular’ titles by the beginning of 2018, however he delayed this plan last year and said he hoped it would get done by 2019.
Now we’re in a situation where it doesn’t look as if the WBA are really going to follow through with this commitment whatsoever.
In late 2017, the light-heavyweight division consisted of Andre Ward (WBA ‘super’ champion, below) and Badou Jack (WBA ‘regular’ champion). Ward retired and Jack vacated, so the WBA decided to elevate ‘interim’ champion Dmitry Bivol and the division was sorted!
In a heartbeat they’d dropped to just one champion as both titles were vacated and the situation was rectified perfectly. A fantastic job well done by the WBA.
However, a few months later Lamont Peterson made a similar move and vacated his WBA ‘regular’ welterweight belt. With Keith Thurman reigning as the ‘super’ champion, we thought this was another division sorted with one sole champion, but the WBA decided to sanction Lucas Matthysse v Tewa Kiram for the vacant ‘regular’ belt. They had the perfect chance to eliminate one of their superfluous titles and instead did the opposite.
All of a sudden, they'd set a very different precedent.
Not long after that, Ryoichi Taguchi (the sole WBA light-flyweight champion) was upgraded to ‘super’ champion and the WBA ordered Carlos Canizales v Reiya Konishi for an unnecessary new ‘regular’ title.
The cherry on top? Murat Gassiev just won the sole cruiserweight title (after Denis Lebedev became ‘champion in recess’), but the WBA have sanctioned Ryad Merhy v Arsen Goulamirian for a new ‘regular’ strap.
That’s three times.
Three chances to drop a belt, three new belts ordered, three broken promises to boxing fans.
There’s also talk of Gervonta Davis facing Jesus Cuellar for a ‘regular’ super-featherweight title. Alberto Machado is the WBA super-featherweight champion, he’s not inactive and will likely make his mandatory defence in May. So why would they now create another meaningless new belt?
The great crime of this plethora of titles is that they take away from the meaning of the term 'world champion'. The man on the street doesn't know who today's boxing champions are because nobody knows which belts to take seriously.
The damage to the sport caused by these actions is unquantifiable. Hence why some deny it exists. However, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realise the average fan found the sport far easier to understand when there were only one or two champions per division.
Now we have four and that’s already tough to keep track of. If we don’t fight back against the WBA’s insistence to make it five, or the IBO’s quest to make it six, then we’ll soon have devalued boxing’s world championships so greatly that they will eventually become completely meaningless.
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