Dream Fights

Dreams, like most fights, usually occur at night. Unlike most fights, dreams are not real, but like many fights and much matchmaking, they are not entirely understood. Dreams take place when people are sleeping; too many fights put people to sleep. Listing a series of “dream fights” is thus only worthwhile if they can occur in the real world, and are real fights. The rest is just dreaming.

The type of fights boxing most needs are in its once-proud heavyweight division. Most boxing folks know that the heavyweight champion of the world used to be considered the toughest person on the planet, as well as holding the most prestigious title in all of world sport. Those days are long gone, along with nickel cups of coffee, black-and-while rabbit ear TVs, and, apparently, civility, reason, and logic.

The ills of this world run by scumbags and the relentless churn of technology may not be solved in a boxing ring, but the heavyweight division’s woes can be. Right now, with Tyson Fury’s 2015 defeat of Wladimir Klitschko and his relinquishing the belts in 2016 due to numerous problems (and a bunch of failed doping tests), there is a new crop of beltholders each striving to become recognized as THE heavyweight champion of the world. The end of the Klitschko era has produced a rocky interregnum, and it is now time for a new standardbearer to emerge.

The only way this can be accomplished is if some type of formal or informal tournament is organized among the various beltholders and top contenders. Certainly the winners of the April 1 Joseph Parker-Hughie Fury and April 29 Anthony Joshua-Wladimir Klitschko fights must be in this mix. Add current WBC champion Deontay Wilder (who should retain his belt on February 25 against Gerald Washington) and the unbeaten man whom no one seems to want to face, Luis Ortiz, and we have four right there. Should Tyson Fury ever re-emerge, add him in somewhere.

Of course, the beltholders will likely be burdened with unworthy mandatories and title stripping by the sanctioning body fee collectors, who strip more than all the Playmates of the Month combined. Just don’t pay them any mind, with their alternative titles and fake belts.

If the winners of these fights outlined here face each other say, by the end of 2018, and one fighter conquers all his foes, then once again we may have a new and virtually universally recognized heavyweight champion of the world.

But if the boxing’s ruling demons do as they usually do, and procrastinate, obstruct, and sabotage, then this mess may not be cleaned up forthwith, and we will only have yet another nightmare.