Last week, Tyson Fury was stripped of his pretend title by a pretend sanctioning body.
“Just like to thank the @ringmagazine for being so patient with me over the last few years," the former heavyweight champ said via Twitter. “This will be the first time since 1922 that the Ring magazine will split from the heavyweight lineage.Tyson Fury always setting precedents.”
Fury loved to crow about being the lineal heavyweight champ and Ring Magazine, the outfit that handed him that title, loved to be acknowledged as the holders of the lineage.
But it was all a bunch of bullshit.
“By the time I got the editor gig in late October,” new Ring Editor-in-Chief Dougie Fischer told Michael Woods in a recent Ring exposé regarding its own self-importance, “Fury was back in training and had signed a deal with ‘Mack The Knife’ management company (MTK Global), a serious outfit and player on the UK scene, so rather than push to have Fury stripped immediately, I had Associate Editor (and UK correspondent) Tom Gray contact MTK and give his team a hard deadline to get his license back and formally announce a scheduled comeback fight. That deadline was January 31. They had three months to get something done and they weren’t able to do it...I don’t think it was fair for Team Fury to keep what was once the biggest prize in sports prisoner...”
Presumably, Fischer said that with a straight face.
Ego and bloated sense of self-importance aside, the lineage, Ring Magazine’s claim to the lineage, and Fury’s desperate clutching at the last semblance of a worthwhile career is all a load of crap.
The lineal champ, by definition, is the man who beat the man who beat the man, etc...Back to the days when there actually WAS one champ (although any half-credible historian can tell you that multiple “world” champions is by no means a modern concept).
Tyson Fury was the man who beat the man who was awarded the belt for beating someone who wasn’t even second best in the division. And THAT lineage only goes back to 2009.
In this real world of stuff that actually happens, the heavyweight title lineage ended with Lennox Lewis’ retirement back in 2004. Right there is the end of the actual lineage. Post-lineage, Wladimir Klitschko came along and established himself as the top heavyweight while his brother, Vitali, came right behind him.
Ring Magazine, desperate to have a heavyweight “champ” atop its self-hyped rankings, “sanctioned” Wladimir Klitschko vs. Ruslan Chagaev as a championship fight for their vacant heavyweight “title.”
So, Klitschko became the “lineal” champ-- in a blowout of a bout against a 5-to-1 underdog-- without having beaten the actual lineal champ or, even, the consensus no. 2 heavyweight. And six years later, Fury would come along to beat Klitschko. If one were to draw a true lineage of the Ring title, it would go something like this: Fury...Klitschko...Ring Magazine editorial staff.
The folks at Ring Magazine and its accompanying RingTV website were so desperate to hold on to a showcase heavyweight lineage that they allowed 26 month of inactivity to go by before finally stripping Fury of their title.
And why were they so desperate for a heavyweight “champ” of their own-- so desperate that they re-wrote their championship policy to accommodate a Klitschko coronation and then ignored many of those policies to keep their belt around Fury’s waist?
A smart cynic might assume that the Ring belts are less about lineage than about promotion for their business. Ring Magazine may not charge a 3% sanctioning fee to its “champions” like the sport’s actual sanctioning bodies do, but they are exacting the equivalent of 3% via flesh trade by pimping out the fighters and the rankings as a promotional tool for their dying magazine and increasingly pointless website. A heavyweight champ carrying a belt with their logo around is like a living, breathing infomercial.
But in the real world where stuff is, like, true and actually accurate, boxing’s title lineages-- all of them-- were dead and buried a long time ago. The sport just doesn’t work like that anymore. Do the work yourself and see how far back any of these lineages go. The fact that Ring Magazine and their pompous offshoot, the Transgender Rankings Board (or something like that), can only crown “lineal” champs in 3-5 of 17 weight classes at any given time-- even with copious amounts of suspected gerrymandering in their rankings-- should speak volumes about the concept’s real world viability.
When the folks at Ring Magazine (or the Transgender rankings people) talk about preserving lineages, what they really mean to say is that they are hell-bent on ESTABLISHING lineages according to their own particular whims and agendas. And with a checkered past that saw them, at least in my lifetime, auctioning off ranking positions and fabricating records at one point and allowing themselves to be bought out by a major promoter, these guys at the Ring seem to be demanding a lot of trust without having done much to earn it.
Listen, in the long run, Ring Magazine’s rankings don’t matter and Fury being stripped of their pretend title and kicked off the pretend lineage is of zero importance.
But, what IS important is for you to remember is that, both in life and in the distorted reality of big-time prizefighting, you should question everything. Don’t ever take what so-called voices of authority say at face value, because, more often then not, it’s a load of self-serving bullshit. Don’t assume it’s the gospel, even if it’s coming from the “Bible of Boxing.”
Honest rankings ARE important, though. Someone, somewhere, could’ve come up with a truly fair and honest ranking system, but they never did. The collective wisdom of ALL of boxing media (such as it is) passed on trying to create something useful in favor of indulging their own feelings of self-importance and business interests. That certainly deserves to be pointed out as well.
Plus, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t get a kick out of poking at some of these pompous asses.
Quick (S)hits:
-- “Zurdo” Ramirez is becoming quite the intriguing fighter, even though he was given an imported heavybag for an opponent on Saturday. I think he rolls right through the Euro super middleweight contingent fighting over at the WBSS. Ramirez vs. David Benavidez would be very interesting.
-- HBO boxing is seriously shitting the bed when it comes to quality control, but the Ramirez-Ahmed mismatch probably wouldn’t have been green lit for broadcast if Arum was still doing business there.
-- Is there anyone, outside of his immediate family and bill collectors, happy that Phil Lo Greco is set to meet Amir Khan April 21?
-- Give yourself a pat on the back if you didn’t bite at Floyd Mayweather’s silly, attention-seeking video snippet of him in an MMA octagon.
Got something for Magno? Send him an email here: paulmagno@theboxingtribune.com