The best way to expose the silliness and hypocrisy of sanctioning bodies is not to waste your time and energy going after them with a clenched fist, but to simply wait. Eventually, if you sit tight and let them do their thing, there is every chance they will walk into the proverbial counterpunch and become architects of their own downfall. You won’t even have to pay a sanctioning fee to watch.
Whether it’s spawning belts – Super, Regular, Interim, and so on – or ranking drug cheats and the deceased, there is a long history of sanctioning body boo-boos and rarely are we surprised when encountering new ones. Even on a good day, you will get some head-scratching decision, a double standard, or a comment from one of the presidents which will force you to question what any of it means. The belts. The bodies. The very concept of a “world champion”.
Just this week, for instance, we have seen two fights made for “world titles” which push the very definition of that already vague term to its limits. The first of the fights, a cruiserweight matchup between Jai Opetaia and Brandon Glanton, will be for the inaugural Zuffa Boxing world cruiserweight title – a new in-house belt proposed by Zuffa Boxing – and pairs the world’s best cruiserweight (according to the International Boxing Federation) against a man who nine months ago lost to Chris Billam-Smith.
Glanton, to his credit, has since then stopped Marcus Browne in Nigeria, but to suggest he is a worthy challenger for Opetaia at this point would be stretching generosity to breaking point. Just because boxing happens to be littered with these kinds of “world title” fights and has been for decades does not mean a continuation of the trend should somehow be excused or, even worse, deemed noteworthy and interesting. That is especially true when dealing with a company who claims to want to change the way the sport is run – for the better, presumably – and rid it of all its confusion and lawlessness. One company, one title, one goal. Or something like that.
Meanwhile, things are no less strange with the recognised sanctioning bodies. The World Boxing Organization (WBO), for example, still one of the newer bodies, are getting ready to approve a voluntary defence for their heavyweight champion, Fabio Wardley, against fellow Brit Daniel Dubois, despite Dubois having lost his last fight.
While Wardley-Dubois is in isolation a good fight, the issue, again, is the wording: “world title”; “champion” versus “challenger”. Because although Wardley vs. Dubois is the right fight for both, and likely to be a compelling watch, a world-title fight it is not. Not even close.
We appreciate that Wardley can do nothing about the fact he picked up the WBO title only when Oleksandr Usyk decided to vacate it, but the bigger issue here is that Dubois, a solid top 10 contender, was last seen losing to Usyk – stopped in five rounds – back in July. On the line that night were a variety of world heavyweight titles, including the WBO’s, and since that night Dubois, unlike Glanton, has failed to re-emerge with any kind of victory. That, in the context of him now receiving another world title shot, is an important point to highlight and belabour. After all, he is, in effect, being gifted a world-title shot on the basis of nothing. Worse, he just lost against a man (Usyk) to whom he had already lost only this time quicker and more convincingly. How can that, in a fair and just world, equate to any fighter then getting another shot at the world title?
Well, it shouldn’t, but it can. In this case, it will. If, as expected, Wardley defends his WBO heavyweight belt against Dubois in Manchester on May 9, we will see, not for the first time, a world champion defend a belt he didn’t win in the ring against a challenger who didn’t have to win a fight to land the opportunity. It is, in many ways, a perfect summation of why boxing manages to perplex outsiders and why organisations like Zuffa Boxing feel they can barge their way in and clean up the mess. It is also, for Wardley, a bizarre situation to find himself in. On the one hand, yes, he will be proud to be holding that WBO belt on May 9 and thrilled to be fighting his countryman in a genuinely fascinating fight. Yet, on the other hand, the man from Ipswich has already had something of an identity crisis as a result of the manner in which he won his WBO belt without Dubois then being served up as his first challenger.
“It’s bittersweet in a sense,” Wardley said of gaining the WBO belt following Usyk’s decision to dump it. “It’s a fantastic thing to happen to me but, and not to sound arrogant, I wanted it all. I wanted it to be picture-perfect. Anyone who gets into boxing dreams of becoming world champion so for me to turn my nose up at it and say, ‘It wasn’t exactly how I wanted it to be,’ almost feels ridiculously arrogant. I love to fight, I love to box, but I also love to earn it as well.”
Ironically, despite everything I have so far said, a win for Wardley over Dubois will be a win he will certainly have to earn. It will also go some way to legitimising Wardley as a champion – a champion, not the champion – if only because Dubois, despite losing to Usyk, remains a respected contender with some good wins to his name. It wasn’t all that long ago, remember, that Dubois was knocking out Anthony Joshua in five rounds. He has even held “world titles” of his own: an IBF strap upgraded from “interim” to full, and a WBA “regular” strap he won when stopping Trevor Bryan in a Miami casino. Dubois, in other words, knows this territory well. He has been in with some decent heavyweights and knows how fringe belts tend to work. Stick around long enough and you are likely to get an opportunity. Smile and say please and it might come sooner than you expect.
Still, none of this is Daniel Dubois’ fault, of course. Nor for that matter is a mooted fight between Dubois and Wardley diminished on account of the weird way in which it has come about. In fact, if anything, the excitement people have expressed in spite of Dubois not deserving his shot speaks to the dwindling visibility and importance of world titles in 2026. It says, in a roundabout way, that we care less about world titles and how they are earned and more about seeing the most interesting and relevant fights happen exactly when they should. Everything else, to us, is just window dressing, or small print. We see the letters but have no idea what they stand for. Normally they spell out “World Boxing something or other” but even knowing the acronym fails to explain what they mean or indeed stand for.
