On Dec. 13, 2022, Naoya Inoue knocked out Paul Butler in the 11th round in Tokyo to become the undisputed bantamweight champion. On Dec. 26, Inoue stopped Marlon Tapales to become the undisputed super bantamweight champion.
And on May 6, Inoue shook off a first-round knockdown to stop two-time world champion in the sixth in their fight at the Tokyo Dome to successfully defend the 122-pound belts. On Sunday, Inoue's reward for that historic 17-month run was to drop from No. 2 to No. 3 in our pound-for-pound men's boxing rankings.
The sport is alive now, and while still rife with issues, it's heading in the right direction. You know it's in a good place when a special talent like Inoue isn't head-and-shoulders above the rest of the field in the pound-for-pound race.
There's legitimate arguments to be made for undisputed welterweight champion Terence Crawford, who has been No. 1 in this poll; Inoue; and new undisputed heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk, who defeated Tyson Fury on Saturday in a fantastic bout in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
And there are others, like WBA lightweight champ Gervonta Davis; unified light heavyweight champ Artur Beterbiev; and undisputed super middleweight champ Canelo Alvarez who merit serious consideration.
Then, a boxer like WBC lightweight champion Shakur Stevenson, while not ready for that spot yet, has all the makings of a pound-for-pound king.
The sport right now is rich in high end talent, and the good news is that for the most part, the best fighters are meeting the best possible challengers.
At one point, boxing was one of the three biggest sports in the U.S., next to baseball and horse racing. All three sports have had their issues and lost relevance in the last half-decade or so. The NFL is the dominant force on the U.S. sports scene, and the NBA has become massive as well. Soccer was always a huge worldwide sport, but it's gained an enormous amount of attention in the U.S. MMA didn't exist 50 years ago and it's surpassed boxing in terms of overall popularity. And we could go on, but the point is obvious.
Most of the problems that plague boxing are self-inflicted. There is no overall governing body or consistent set of rules; hell, the four major sanctioning bodies can't even agree on the names of the weight classes.
It's simple if you're a boxing fan, but it's confusing to a fan who might be new to the sport to know that the 154-pound weight division is known as super welterweight by the WBA and WBC and as junior middleweight by the IBF and WBO.
There are 17 weight classes in which a champion is crowned by the IBF and WBO, but 18 in the WBA and WBC, which both recognize the bridgerweight division. Bridgerweight is a new class which goes from 200 to 224, with heavyweight beginning in those bodies at 225.
Usyk, by the way, weighed 223.5 on Saturday when he fought Fury, so he would have been able to fight at bridgerweight had he so chosen.
That's a small problem, but I'm not here to bury the sport today.
It's digging itself out of the enormous hole it's dug, and while it's a Sisyphean task, it's encouraging nonetheless that things are happening for the betterment of the sport.
It took the involvement of the Saudi Arabian government and its by now-famous General Entertainment Authority run by Turki Alalshikh to get the heavyweight title unified. The key, however is not what it took to get it done but the simple fact that it got done. When it was crunch time and time to put pen on paper, those involved chose to make it happen. That's progress for a sport which sorely needs it.
And now, there's a strong argument to be made that a heavyweight is the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world. Pound-for-pound was created in the middle of the 20th century as a way for boxing journalists at the time to explain to people how great Sugar Ray Robinson was. Joe Louis was a dominant and popular heavyweight champion, and the heavyweights in the 1930s and 1940s were by far the most popular division.Louis was regarded as the baddest man on the planet.But Robinson was so good that writers needed a way to compare them, and so pound-for-pound was born. Usyk won an Olympic gold medal in 2012, won the undisputed cruiserweight title in 2018 and on Saturday won the undisputed heavyweight championship despite giving up 381/2 pounds when he bested Fury.
It was a compelling fight, but in the back half of the bout when he needed it most, Usyk stepped up. He nearly stopped Fury in the ninth, when he was saved by the bell and some in Usyk's team insist by referee Mark Nelson.
But it was Usyk in the second half when the fight was decided who overcome the body shots that Fury had landed, the fatigue that had set in and the pressure on him to win for his country.
He's the best.
Now, either Crawford or Inoue could be No. 1 and anyone who chooses to rank either of them first would not be wrong.
But Usyk is a special fighter who has accomplished something rare. In his six heavyweight fights, starting with his first against Chazz Witherspoon, he's been outweighed by 27 pounds; 381/4 pounds; 183/4 pounds; 23 pounds; 121/4 pounds and 381/2 pounds. That's an average of 26.3 pounds per fight he gave up.
It's remarkable what he's been able to do despite giving up so much size. It's also what makes him at this point the best pound-for-pound boxer in the world.