Controversy Still Brewing with Timothy Bradley & The WBC:
A week and a half ago, I wrote about the WBC’s scandalous decision to strip champion Timothy Bradley of the organization’s light welterweight title and give Erik Morales a title shot in September. On paper, much has changed in that situation over the course of the last 12 days, but one core fact remains the same: the WBC royally screwed Timothy Bradley.
Once the firestorm broke over the WBC’s lifting of Bradley’s hard-earned WBC belt, WBC honcho Jose Sulaiman was quick with an attempt to ameliorate the public by claiming that Bradley had not, in fact, been stripped of his title. Instead, the WBC was declaring him a “Champion in Recess,” and that Bradley can reclaim his title whenever he wants to. Ignoring for the moment that farces like interim championships, championships in recess, diamond championships, and super championships are diluting whatever value a trinket like the WBC’s green strap had in the first place, Sulaiman’s story still stinks.
It does not change the underlying facts that Bradley had only won the title six months before, or that the WBC failed to name a mandatory challenger for Bradley to face. Their claim, either for stripping Bradley or making him a champion in recess, is based on the spurious notion that Bradley was somehow delinquent in his responsibilities as a WBC titleholder. By any reasonable standard, Bradley clearly was not.
When Morales was awarded a fight for the vacant WBC strap, it was originally against his scheduled opponent for September, a tomato can named Jorge Barrios. However, having broken enough of his own rules in one go, apparently having Morales fight the unranked Barrios, multiple years and weight classes past his best, for the WBC belt was apparently too much, even for Sulaiman. “El Terrible” is now facing off with Lucas Matthysse instead. This is a real championship match-up, since Morales is ranked #8 and Mattysse at #7 by Proboxing-fans. Given that Matthysse narrowly lost fights with Zab Judah and Devon Alexander, he is no cakewalk for Morales.
Yet even if Erik Morales is now fighting a real opponent instead of a paper tiger for the WBC strap, it still doesn’t change the fact that the WBC is blatantly rewarding one of the organization’s favorites at the expense of one of its best champions (Timothy Bradley is still the consensus top dog in the light welterweight division). However Jose Sulaiman wants to explain it away, Timothy Bradley isn’t the WBC champ anymore, and Erik Morales clearly got a leg up into a wearing a new title belt. Let’s not forget, Sulaiman screwed Sergio Martinez to help Julio Cesar Chavez, Jr. in a similar fashion.
If Sulaiman wanted to do Morales a favor, the right thing to have done was to have named Morales the mandatory challenger and sent him off to do battle with Bradley. It would have raised some eyebrows, true, but rigged rankings are far less outrageous than taking the title away from a worthy champion and handing it to a crony on a silver platter.
