OOn Saturday, Anthony Joshua and Daniel Dubois will meet in the ring in front of more than 90,000 screaming fans at Wembley Stadium. It’s a quality matchup between two good fighters. But once again, the powers that be in boxing have chosen short-term profit over the long-term health of the sport by promoting Joshua-Dubois as a fight for the heavyweight championship of the world.
It isn’t.
The heavyweight champion of the world is Oleksandr Usyk. He earned that title by beating Joshua twice, knocking out Dubois and winning a split decision over Tyson Fury in a divisional title unification bout last May. The unification of the four major sanctioning body belts is the most significant boxing achievement yet to be accomplished under the auspices of Turki Alalshikh, the chief executive of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority. But in search of positive branding in the UK and hoping to promote a “Riyadh Season” event that doesn’t lose tens of millions of dollars, the Saudis are joining Eddie Hearn and Frank Warren, who promote Joshua and Dubois respectively, in a bid to re-fray the heavyweight crown.
Boxing has four main sanctioning bodies: the World Boxing Council, World Boxing Association, World Boxing Organization and International Boxing Federation. In this case, Usyk was stripped of his IBF belt as a result of his decision to fight a contractually obligated rematch against Fury in December rather than face a less deserving “mandatory challenger” whom he had already knocked out.
The mandatory challenger is an opponent who must fight a champion or give up his title. The concept arose from the abuses of a bygone era when boxing had eight weight classes with one champion in each division.
“In the old days, a fighter got a shot at the title by beating the other best fighters,” says boxing historian Mike Silver. “But the system didn’t always work, especially for black fighters. Charley Burley never got a shot at the title. Archie Moore waited years and had to sign with [manager] Jack Kearns before he had the chance.”
Silver goes on to explain that in the 1930s, a group of state athletic commissions came together to form the National Boxing Association. Eventually, the NBA consisted of 43 state commissions, although New York (the most powerful commission in the country) was not among them. When Mickey Walker gave up the middleweight title to campaign as a heavyweight, the NBA held a tournament to determine a successor. And it instituted a sanctioning fee for championship fights. The fee was one dollar.
The NBA also instituted a mandatory challenger system. One of the first fighters to be stripped was Sugar Ray Robinson. In 1959, Robinson fought only once (against a club fighter named Bob Young, whom he knocked out in two rounds). And the NBA stripped him of his title after he refused to fight a return bout against Carmen Basilio. After that, only the New York and Massachusetts commissions recognized Robinson as middleweight champion, and he lost his next fight to Paul Pender.
The NBA wasn’t perfect, but there was a semblance of fairness. Then, in the early 1960s, the NBA evolved into the World Boxing Association and the world sanctioning body gained a “political” foothold.
The world’s sanctioning bodies today are motivated by making money for the private interests that control them. Promoters subsidize the organizations by paying to attend sanctioning body conventions where they lobby for preferential treatment for their fighters, buying advertising in sanctioning body magazines, and the like. But the sanctioning fees paid for fights are the largest source of revenue for the world’s sanctioning bodies.
The public is familiar with the sanctioning fees paid for world championship fights. But fighters also pay sanctioning fees to fight for regional titles that move them up the ladder to “elimination fights” and “box-offs” where they can then become a mandatory challenger. Without the mandatory designation to strive for, many of these sanctioning fees would disappear and market forces (including fan preferences) would dictate which champions get fought.
Mandatory defenses—or the refusal to fight in them—can have a major impact. The most famous example of a fighter being stripped for not making a mandatory defense occurred in 1978, when the World Boxing Council stripped Leon Spinks of his title and declared mandatory challenger Ken Norton “heavyweight champion of the world” after Spinks declared his intention to rematch Muhammad Ali. Norton was affiliated with Don King (who had close ties to WBC president Jose Sulaiman). The Ali-Spinks rematch was promoted by Bob Arum. It was widely believed that those alliances played a role in Sulaiman’s thinking.
Mandatory challenger designations also affect smaller fights. Promoter Russell Peltz recalls how years ago the WBA made bantamweight champion Jeff Chandler mandatory against Miguel Iriarte (who was from Panama, where the WBA was headquartered). Iriarte had achieved mandatory status without ever fighting quality opponents. His previous three fights had been against opponents who ended their ring careers with a composite record of no wins to 11 losses. Chandler toyed with Iriarte, knocking him out in the ninth round.
Mandatory defenses become even more important when a fighter (like Usyk) has earned all four belts, four sanctioning bodies require mandatory defenses, and can’t fight often enough to please everyone. In that regard, former unified heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis recently stated, “If you put all the belts together, a lot of promoters don’t like that because all the belts are in one place and they can’t take their guy with them and make money. For them, it’s better to have them split up. For the promotions, they don’t want that either. They want to be able to move around [their belts] all around. The only ones who want to go unchallenged are the guys who box for it and work towards it.”
Dubois took a roundabout route to becoming the IBF’s mandatory challenger. He suffered his first loss in 2020 at the age of 23, when he opted out of the fight against Joe Joyce after suffering a fractured left orbital bone. The decision was understandable given the nature of the injury. More problematic was that Dubois underperformed on the judges’ scorecards in round nine of a title fight against Usyk last year, taking a knee and retiring.
Dubois bounced back from his loss to Usyk to stop a massively out of shape Jarrell Miller in 10 rounds in Riyadh. He then fought Filip Hrgovic (then the IBF mandatory challenger) on June 1 of this year, also in Riyadh. Hrgovic has a less than stellar resume. Dubois knocked him out in the eighth round.
That made Dubois the IBF’s new mandatory challenger. And despite Dubois only holding the position for a few weeks, the IBF demanded that Usyk fight Dubois a second time in his next outing (which the Ukrainian couldn’t do due to his contractually obligated rematch with Fury). So on June 25, Usyk vacated the IBF belt.
Alalshikh could have intervened to prevent Usyk from losing the IBF title. As it stands, most of the powers that be in boxing bow to Saudi money. His Excellency (as Alalshikh is known) could have simply said, “Going forward, the General Entertainment Authority will not do business with any sanctioning body, promoter or fighter involved in a heavyweight championship fight for the vacant IBF belt.” But as noted above, branding Joshua-Dubois as a world championship fight suits the Saudis’ interests.
Dubois is now designated the IBF “heavyweight champion” without ever having won an IBF championship fight. Technically, Joshua is the “challenger,” although in reality AJ is the promotion’s A-side and a 4-to-1 betting favorite. The fight is formally marketed as a fight for the IBF heavyweight championship of the world. However, “IBF” is often dropped from the conversation to promote the perception that this is for the heavyweight crown.
The winner of Joshua-Dubois is expected to challenge the winner of Usyk-Fury II for the heavyweight throne. But there have been plenty of slip-ups between the cup and the lip. Alalshikh recently said that if Joshua wins, he would like AJ to fight Fury next, even if Tyson loses to Usyk for the second time.
Meanwhile, the IBF is handed a huge fine by Joshua-Dubois.