For those of you not immersed in Sanctioning Body Lore, which can drive unprepared minds to madness, the WBA is by far the least professional of the four. Compared to the WBC, which hides its self-dealing and blatant hypocrisy behind a veneer of professionalism, they\u2019re a sort of improvisational evil, haphazardly slapping together titles and rankings between spurts of naked partisanship.<\/p>\n
Or, because I\u2019m still Andor-pilled and not scheduled to be humanely euthanized for it until next week, the WBC is the Imperial Security Bureau<\/a> and the WBA is Mos Eisley Cantina<\/a>.<\/p>\n Let Trevor Bryan fight BJ Flores for a title after beating two guys with a combined record of 4-44? Sure<\/a>. Let Don King yank Mahmoud Charr around for nearly half a decade? Why not<\/a>. Rank a dead guy? Hell yeah<\/a>, pass the coke.<\/p>\n Their tomfoolery hit critical mass in August 2021, when Gabriel Maestre received both a thorough schooling from Mykal Fox and, somehow, all three scorecards<\/a>. It then came out that judge Gloria Martinez Rizzo was married to a WBA executive and also cartoonishly racist<\/a>.<\/p>\n After years of ineptitude and greed, this proved the straw that broke the camel\u2019s back. Public pressure forced Gilberto Mendoza to embark on a campaign of title consolidation that, I must admit, he actually followed through on. Over the next few years, they steadily whittled down each division\u2019s champions from four (super, world, interim, gold) to one or two. Sure, they still didn\u2019t consistently force champions to fight their mandatory challengers and their rankings weren\u2019t the best, but you have to grade these sorts of things on a curve.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, recent news suggests they\u2019re back on their BS. Checking their rankings<\/a> reveals a smorgasbord of nonsense, including:<\/p>\n They show no signs of slowing down, either. They currently have three bantamweight champions: world champ Antonio Vargas, super champ turned champion-in-recess Seiya Tsutsumi, and the aforementioned Waseem. They\u2019re going to add a fourth, the interim champion, when Nonito Donaire fights Andres Campos in a couple weeks<\/a>. Donaire has lost two straight. Campos is an unranked super flyweight.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not the best one. The best one is at featherweight.<\/p>\n So, Nick Ball has not actually fought a contender at his weight since edging out Raymond Ford for the belt last year. Instead, he beat super bantamweights Ronny Rios and TJ Doheny, the latter of whom was just six months removed from a knockout loss to Naoya Inoue.<\/p>\n He doesn\u2019t have a fight booked. He has a mandatory challenger in Mirco Cuello, who scored a last-minute come-from-behind body shot finish of Christian Olivo in a February eliminator<\/a>. Thus, the WBA took the obvious next step of having Cuello (Argentinian) fight TBA for the interim belt in the classic boxing hotspot of Benghazi, Libya<\/a>.<\/p>\n I will say this for Gilberto Mendoza and co.: at least their corruption is funny.<\/p>\n\n