Billy Joe Saunders' Mouth Writing Checks His Fists Refuse to Cash
Billy Joe Saunders has become a shining example of everything that is wrong with boxing today.
He’s a talker who refuses to become a walker.
The WBO middleweight champion will make the first defense of the title he won from Andy Lee last December when he tangles with relatively unknown Russian Artur Akavov on Oct. 22 at Motorpoint Arena in Cardiff, Wales, per Dan Rafael of ESPN.com.
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This, apparently, is the one Saunders felt everyone was waiting for after seeing the last 10 months of his mouth running produce zero meaningful rounds.
The decision to face Akavov is an insult to the fans and shows the Brit simply isn’t serious about accepting the type of challenges he talks about whenever presented with a camera and a social media platform.
Akavov only carries one loss on his ledger—which came in 2012 against an opponent with four fights—but he doesn’t rate in the top 10 of the WBO’s most recent rankings (or that of any sanctioning body) and hasn’t fought a single round against world-class opposition.
But the Brit was hellbent on facing him.
Just look at the fights he turned down to get this one.
Saunders was offered a primo slot as the main support bout for Canelo Alvarez’s September 154-pound title showdown with Liam Smith on American pay-per-view before what turned out to be more than 50,000 fans at AT&T Stadium in Dallas.
The champion was reportedly given his pick between veteran contenders Gabe Rosado, Willie Monroe Jr. and Curtis Stevens. None of them are world-beaters, and Saunders would be favored to defeat each one and had a pretty considerable back-end guarantee.
That guarantee included massive exposure to an American television audience and a possible chance to defend his belt against Canelo—the biggest commercial draw in the sport—in what figured to be the most lucrative start of his career.
Weigh that up for a second.
A winnable fight and exposure followed by the biggest star in the sport and a boatload of cash.
Not good enough. Get Saunders some anonymous Russian nobody has ever heard of before.
Make sense?
That’d be a terrible look for any fighter, but it’s particularly bad for a guy such as Saunders, who has been extremely vocal since winning his belt.
He briefly flirted with the idea of stepping up to challenge unified middleweight champion—and the sport’s resident wrecking ball—Gennady Golovkin before deciding a seven-figure payday was insufficient.
In his defense, how do you place a fair value on what’ll likely be just a few minutes of work on fight night and necessitate taking meals from a straw for a few weeks?
Saunders also posted a message via Twitter on Sept. 10, shortly after GGG scored his 23rd consecutive knockout victory by forcing Kell Brook’s corner to pull the plug after its fighter suffered a broken eye socket (h/t the Sun).
He told him to pick a date and he'd be ready.
It’s a testament to how far his stock has fallen that few, if any, in the boxing media and fandom took his repeated reiterations that he wanted GGG seriously. It looked self-serving, and it was.
Instead, we get Akavov, who, no matter how much spin comes from Saunders or his promoter, Frank Warren, is wholly undeserving of a championship opportunity. But that won’t stop them from trying to pretend this fight is meaningful.
“This is Bill’s first fight in 10 months,” Warren said, per Rafael. “The Russian is a tough guy who is capable of making things awkward. Hopefully, Bill will shake off the ring rust with a successful defense to set up a superfight for early [in the new] year.”
It’s only his first fight in 10 months because he turned down challenge after challenge. It's not like it was an accident or he was hurt. He chose not to fight.
As it turns out, he ended up in exactly the fight he wanted—which says a lot—even if nobody else wanted it.
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