Don’t Hold Your Breath on a GGG-Canelo Unification Fight

---

In the Oct. 18, 1924, editions of the New York Herald Tribune, Grantland Rice authored one of the most famous opening paragraphs in sports writing history. Assessing Notre Dame’s 13-7 victory over a powerful Army team at the Polo Grounds, Rice paid tribute to the celebrated Fighting Irish backfield thusly: “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden.”

A few days before Mexican superstar Saul “Canelo” Alvarez’s emphatic points victory over defrocked WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto of Puerto Rico Saturday night at Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay, the Four Horsemen -- well, at least one of them (WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman) -- saddled up. Cotto was stripped of his WBC title for failure to fork over the organization’s typically hefty sanctioning fee (in this instance, $300,000), meaning that Alvarez would be recognized as the WBC’s 160-pound (uh, right) ruler if he won, but Cotto wouldn’t, although he would remain the lineal champ.

“It was all about money,” Cotto said when told of the WBC’s ruling. “The fee for this fight was absurd to me and I prefer to keep the money in my account. The organizations want four champions in every division just to earn a percentage from everybody, then we have to pay for their mistakes. This is not for me. The WBC told me my offer (of a reduced fee of $125,000) was not reasonable to them. I don’t need their belt. I have enough belts in my house and with the money I saved, I can buy any belt I want.”

Boxing purists forever peeved at the four major sanctioning bodies’ presumed chicanery applauded Cotto’s decision to tell the WBC to stick its demand where the sun don’t shine. Everyone knows where those fat sanctioning fees go, right? For first-class air travel for WBC officials to stay in five-star hotels at fight sites, for fine cuisine in upscale restaurants and for limousine transport from Point A to Point B. Shouldn’t all or most of their hard-earned purses go to the champions who give so much of themselves inside the ropes? Who needs these semi-phony alphabet titles, anyway? If a fighter is accomplished enough and famous enough, fans will want to see him in action regardless of whether a bejeweled belt is on the line, right?

Well, that is one side of the story, and it is not without merit. But there is always another side to tell, and in this instance it is not so pure of purpose. The stripping of Cotto’s championship -- and the power brokers of the WBC (Sulaiman), WBA (Gilberto Mendoza), IBF (Daryl Peoples) and WBO (Francisco Valcarel) invoke executive privilege to do more stripping than can be found in your typical “gentlemen’s cabaret” -- shrouds a perhaps darker purpose.

As the new WBC, lineal and The Ring magazine middleweight champ, Alvarez (46-1-1, 32 KOs) ostensibly is obligated to make his next defense against the man -- power-punching Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (33-0, 31 KOs) -- who holds the WBA “super” and IBF belts, as well as the WBC’s “interim” title, whatever that means. It is a fight that would absolutely determine who is the true king of the division (although Ireland’s Andy Lee holds the WBO version of the prize), dispersing whatever clouds of doubt there might be as to that individual’s identity.

But, boxing being boxing, what the fans want and what they get aren’t always the same. Alvarez and Cotto signed mutual rematch clauses for Saturday’s big fight, and to hear Cotto’s trainer, Freddie Roach, tell it, his side is inclined to exercise it. Should Canelo-Cotto II be placed next on the new WBC champ’s docket, it again would push Golovkin back in line for the unification showdown everyone wants to see, except maybe the guy who would have to swap punches with the most-feared, and most-ducked, fighter in the business.

“I and he (Cotto) felt we outscored Canelo in this fight ... l’d like to think maybe a rematch (is next for Cotto), but we’ll see,” said the Puerto Rican’s trainer, Freddie Roach, who offered a minority opinion that the 35-year-old future Hall of Famer was jobbed despite scorecards (119-109, 118-110 and 117-111 for Canelo) and punch statistics (129 of 629, 21 percent, for Cotto to 155 of 484, 32 percent, for Cotto).

Truth be told, Canelo-Cotto II would be reasonably well-received -- probably more so than Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Manny Pacquiao II, given the disappointing nature of the original -- but it is not nearly as attractive as Canelo-Golovkin would be. And that’s where the Four Horsemen ride again, as they so frequently do.

It is one thing for a fighter to earnestly insist he wants to mix it up with a particularly fearsome opponent, but there are ways to ensure it doesn’t happen. Division of the financial pie is always a sticking point, and the matter of weight -- Cotto-Canelo was contested at a catch weight of 155 pounds, five below the middleweight limit -- is another. If you’re the middleweight champion, you should not be allowed to dictate catch weights for title bouts below 160 pounds, but Cotto got away with it and now Canelo, a former WBC and WBA super welterweight champ, appears to be adopting the same dubious stance.

“I’m not afraid of any fighter,” Alvarez said when the issue of a clear-the-decks bout with Golovkin (who was at ringside) was raised. “GGG is a great fighter and he is my friend. I have respect for him, but if we do fight, it’s going to be at my (natural) weight class (presumably another 155-pound limit). I’m the champion. I don’t have to do what he wants.”

No, Canelo, you are not the champion. You are a champion, and your obligation is to fight the most credible opponents and, if possible, to unify without trying to mandate gimmicky catch weights. But there is a school of thought that Cotto, as good as he is and has been, wanted no part of Golovkin, and it now seems that Canelo, or his promoter, Golden Boy president Oscar De La Hoya, so protective of his chief asset, is of the same mind.

Consider what two former middleweight champions, Sergio Martinez and Nino Benvenuti, said when asked if they thought the Cotto-Canelo winner would then test himself against the knockout artist from Kazakhstan.

“I have a lot of doubts that the Cotto-Canelo winner will fight Golovkin,” Martinez said during the most recent International Boxing Hall of Fame induction weekend in June. “Actually, I am fairly certain it will not happen. There’s no way.”

Added Benvenuti, a 1992 inductee into the IBHOF: “The winner will never fight Golovkin. I cannot say I am 100 percent certain of that. Maybe 99.5 percent. It’s very simple. Golovkin is an airplane, everyone else is a helicopter. Golovkin is very, very strong. Maybe somebody who fights an intelligent fight might be able to beat him, but I don’t see it happening.”

So the biggest available names at middleweight find a way to steer clear of Golovkin, who, at 33, might be edging toward the back end of his prime. He thus is obliged to take less-desirable defenses against the likes of Willie Monroe Jr., Marco Antonio Rubio, Osumanu Adams and Gabriel Rosado, at least until he becomes noticeably diminished.

It all leads back to the very concept of multiple sanctioning bodies and their authority to dictate who fights whom and when, which can be looked upon as the right or wrong thing, depending on circumstances. It is not unlike those summit conferences held during World War II, where Allied leaders Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin consulted with one another on joint courses of action to help defeat the Axis powers while not-so-secretly harboring their own agendas. When Germany surrendered, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, in particular, instantly found themselves at cross-purposes and staring at one another from across the chasm of a Cold War. And so it is with the Four Horsemen of the boxing apocalypse, who give lip service to working together but are more intent on protecting their own turf.

The notion of some form of central authority that would oblige champions to conduct themselves as champions is, of course, reasonable and goes back a long way. From 1920 to ’23, Johnny Wilson was the middleweight titlist, but he defended his belt infrequently and mostly against second-tier opposition. The man Wilson was especially careful to avoid was Harry Greb, who was the No. 1 contender for a long time but was never offered a shot at Wilson’s championship. Eventually, most U.S. states declined to recognize Wilson as the champ and the boxing board designated Greb as the “middleweight defender,” which was a step short of him being recognized as the real champion. Greb, to his credit, felt slighted because he believed championships are won or lost in the ring, and he didn’t much care to settle for some honorary crown that lacked the gravitas of indisputable legitimacy.

Jump forward 92 years and you now have four world sanctioning bodies and more titles to be passed around in 17 weight classes than bottles of cheap hooch on Skid Row. The WBA, perhaps the most egregious offender, presents “super” and “regular” world title belts (Daniel Jacobs defends the WBA “regular” middleweight title against Peter “Kid Chocolate” Quillin on Dec. 5 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y.), not to mention interim and emeritus championships. It is inflation of the worst kind, and serves only to demean outstanding fighters who never get to vie for or hold more than slivers of a title.

The list of champions who have been stripped by the alphabet organizations reads like a Who’s Who of boxing. Among those who lost their titles by decree and not in the ring are Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Larry Holmes, Archie Moore, Bob Foster, Carlos Monzon, Jose Napoles, Wilfred Benitez, Bob Foster, Riddick Bowe, Lennox Lewis and Naseem Hamed -- all of whom are inductees into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. And don’t forget, Mayweather had his WBO welterweight belt lifted before his megafight with Pacquiao because, like Cotto, he refused to pay a $200,000 sanctioning fee he obviously could have afforded. Fortunately for most of the all-time greats on that list, there were other sanctioning bodies ready, willing and able to provide them with championship opportunities. Still, you have to wonder: Would any of the aforementioned have been unduly harmed if they said, “Thanks all the same, but I’ll just hold onto my cash and you can keep your shiny trinket”?

It will be interesting to see whether the Mexico City-based WBC, which has long been accused of issuing mandates that favor that country’s fighters, will press Golden Boy Promotions to put Alvarez in with Golovkin at the earliest possible date. It is the WBC, remember, that stripped Martinez of his middleweight title for reasons that still seem a bit unclear and conferred it upon Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., who just happened to be WBC president Jose Sulaiman’s godson. When Chavez Jr. and Martinez did square off, Martinez, save for a scary moment in the 12th round when he was knocked down, won virtually every second of every round.

Should Alvarez opt not to fight Golovkin in a timely manner, the guess here is that the strip-happy WBC somehow will find a way not to relieve him of its title for noncompliance because … well, you know. But there are other examples of selective enforcement of the organizations’ rules that media members are never given access to. If GGG isn’t the most-ducked fighter out there, then WBA/IBF/WBO light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev is. The WBC keeps dropping hints that it would prefer that its champ, Adonis Stevenson (who also holds The Ring magazine and lineal titles) get it on with Kovalev for full dominion in the 175-pound weight class, but Stevenson seems as adverse to that pairing as he would be to have an unanesthetized root canal.

Can you imagine the furor that would arise if the Golden State Warriors were able to say they were prefer not to face the Cleveland Cavaliers and LeBron James in the NBA Finals, so would the league office kindly allow them to make an optional defense against, say, the New York Knicks? And then for the NBA to allow it because its championship committee had installed the Knicks as the No. 1 contender?

In pro basketball, if the postseason paredown so dictates, you get Steph Curry against LeBron for the big trophy. It isn’t always so in boxing, and therein lies a problem for a sport that often finds a way to screw up the unscrewable. Here’s hoping that those with the capability of doing the right thing actually do so: Make GGG-Canelo, soon and with no arbitrary catch weight.

Lest the Four Horsemen ride again.

Bernard Fernandez, a five-term president of the Boxing Writers Association of America, received the Nat Fleischer Award from the BWAA in April 1999 for lifetime achievement and was inducted into the Pennsylvania Boxing Hall of Fame in 2005, as well as the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame in 2013. The New Orleans-born sports writer has worked in the industry since 1969 and pens a weekly column on the Sweet Science for Sherdog.com.