With Shakur Stevenson outgrowing 130, the light-weight division has gone from having “4 Kings” to “5 Kings.”
However, just like the ascension of King Charles III to the British throne following the demise of Queen Elizabeth, this spotlights the truth that royalty simply ain’t what it was.
This piece is to not disparage the abilities of 135’s present batch of prime dogs– Devin Haney, Gervonta Davis, Vasiliy Lomachenko, Ryan Garcia, and Stevenson. This piece is, nonetheless, meant to disparage boxing’s ass-backwards enterprise philosophy and rotten enterprise mannequin that may hold any of those guys from preventing each other any time quickly.
And make no mistake about it, none of those guys will possible be getting within the ring with any of the others on this quick checklist of stars within the foreseeable future.
Realistically, a number of the finest fights at 135 COULD occur. Lomachenko and Stevenson are Prime Rank fighters. Haney is now co-promoted by Prime Rank. Former “king,” Teofimo Lopez can be with Prime Rank, regardless that he now competes at 140, the place most of those different guys can even be campaigning at some point.
However, nah. The Prime Rank in-house stuff ain’t occurring, simply because the cross-promotional, cross-platform, cross-network stuff ain’t more likely to occur. Relatively, it’s solely occurring over Bob Arum’s lifeless physique. Arum pitting Lomachenko and Stevenson, particularly, in opposition to each other, in his eyes, could be like taking an enormous cash Ferrari and a prime of the road Lamborghini and crashing them into each other. However Arum IS 90 years previous, so “over his lifeless physique” doesn’t imply as a lot because it used to.
I’m certain Arum would gladly throw Haney below both the Shakur or Vasiliy bus to get the 4 belts round somebody he absolutely controls. However that’ll be a bit down the road and more durable than one would picture since Crew Haney could be a robust nut to crack in negotiations.
Gervonta “Tank” Davis versus any of those guys appears to be like to be an absolute fairy story at this level. Davis’ promoter, Floyd Mayweather, appears to confuse what labored for him and what’s going to work for various fighters in a unique time. It stays to be seen whether or not deliberately antagonizing followers by proudly and defiantly not giving them what they need will do something to maneuver the needle from reside attraction to celebrity.
And Ryan Garcia? I’ll repeat myself, however my stance on all issues “King Ry” is identical as my stance on UFOs– I’ll consider it after I see it. The child calls everybody out, then jumps into his social media rabbit gap whereas promoter Oscar De La Hoya fumbles round making a jackass of himself and making it more durable to make any of the large fights Garcia supposedly desires. I don’t know. I don’t care. However the actuality is that this child might be a money-making machine. That makes it much more uncertain that, at 24 and nonetheless very a lot an unfinished mission, his workforce would throw him within the ring in opposition to somebody who may curb stomp him and ship him again to the consolation zone of Bang Power Drink sponsored Instagram posts.
In the meantime, 4-belt unified champ Devin Haney and his workforce have confirmed themselves to be exceedingly pragmatic– a lot in order that it’s exhausting to think about them taking all that many dangers contemplating the concessions they needed to make to get their shot at unifying all of the belts.
And there you might have it. 5 “kings” ruling 5 completely separate kingdoms who may by no means truly trouble to invade anybody else’s. Simply by means of dumb luck, a few of these guys might occur to face each other, though it’ll most likely occur when one or two present appreciable slippage or vulnerability.
There are some strong lightweights– certainly princes, not but kings– who stand outdoors the highest 5 and could be worthy pretenders/contenders to the thrones, completely prepared to leap at any likelihood to get these guys into the ring. Isaac Cruz, for instance, would battle a threshing machine if there was a paycheck hooked up to it.
However the stars aren’t preventing each other. They’re not even near doing so. Blame the boxing enterprise for that. Blame the followers for not boycotting the promoters’ filler and distraction. Blame the fighters, themselves, for using the lopsided wagon of a broken-down boxing enterprise cart. No matter.
All I do know is that this could piss us off greater than it’s.
