Titles: What Do They Really Mean

Titles: What Do They Really Mean 

I was reading an old book on boxing that’s been gathering dust over the years and one specific chapter caught my eye, and it’s still very relevant today. It’s specifically around titles, that the perception is that we need a manufactured title to enjoy the fight or to make that fight more important.

TV stations feel that we need some kind of pointless and meaningless belt to not only appreciate the fight or even to even watch it in the first place.

Are fight fans viewed as being that shallow, stupid even, that we have to have a ‘fake’ title to smell a good fight. I don’t think we are in any way shallow or stupid, most of us know what represents a good fight, what’s worth our time and what isn’t.

In reality, titles are needed to try to justify what we are being served. How many times do we watch when we already know who will win long before the first bell. Having a title on the line can’t hide the uncomfortable truth, a better fight with no title often is more preferable.

The majority of us are not fooled, we see things for what they are. Most of my articles don’t include the various belts that are on the line in specific fights, most of the time they are an irrelevance, they don’t need or deserve mentioning.

I know certain belts mean a lot, everything even, to the fighters, but the vast majority of them mean absolutely nothing, at least to me and I suspect the majority of fight fans also.

I’ve always wondered if fighters really think they are a world champion when they merely in reality only have a fraction of a claim to be called a world champion. A fighter will argue his version of a world title means as much as the 3 others, maybe, but that’s not my point.

I was brought up in another era when there were only the WBA and the WBC, still one too many but manageable. Now the governing bodies have grown, it’s hard for even the most hardcore of fan to keep up.

Fighters get more opportunities because there are more titles to go around, and good luck to them, but I crave the return of that lost era, a time of simplicity.

Titles should mean something, the British scene remains largely intact. Area and English titles, graduating to the British, it does what it says on the tin.

But now we even have different versions of the European title, followed by the various belts around leading up to the farce there currently is around the various world title belts that are doing the rounds, regular, super, interim and so on.

I don’t begrudge any fighter anything they earn from the mess that is around them, if they benefit from it, fine, they earn every single penny.

But ideally I want the belts to mean more than the dollar, it should mean a whole lot more. THE world champion, not A world champion, that should be the aim.

Nothing will change, of course, boxing is a sport, but it’s more a business now, it always was but even more so now. People will try to profit from it, politics and the numbers run the game.

The one hope is that it’s the fighters that will benefit more than the people who sit behind a desk dreaming up how to make a simple sport more farcical than it needs to be.