I regret to inform you that the WBA is at it again

Scorpion, frog, etcetera

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’re a sort of improvisational evil, haphazardly slapping together titles and rankings between spurts of naked partisanship.

Or, because I’m still Andor-pilled and not scheduled to be humanely euthanized for it until next week, the WBC is the Imperial Security Bureau and the WBA is Mos Eisley Cantina.

Let Trevor Bryan fight BJ Flores for a title after beating two guys with a combined record of 4-44? Sure. Let Don King yank Mahmoud Charr around for nearly half a decade? Why not. Rank a dead guy? Hell yeah, pass the coke.

Their tomfoolery hit critical mass in August 2021, when Gabriel Maestre received both a thorough schooling from Mykal Fox and, somehow, all three scorecards. It then came out that judge Gloria Martinez Rizzo was married to a WBA executive and also cartoonishly racist.

After years of ineptitude and greed, this proved the straw that broke the camel’s 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’s champions from four (super, world, interim, gold) to one or two. Sure, they still didn’t consistently force champions to fight their mandatory challengers and their rankings weren’t the best, but you have to grade these sorts of things on a curve.

Unfortunately, recent news suggests they’re back on their BS. Checking their rankings reveals a smorgasbord of nonsense, including:

• Giving Cuban Olympic veteran Julio Cesar La Cruz a secondary “bridgerweight” belt for beating 136th-ranked cruiserweight Austine Nnamdi.
• 46-year-old Felix Sturm holding the “gold” light heavyweight belt thanks to a knockout over 39-year-old Benjamin Blindert, who doesn’t crack BoxRec’s top 450.
• Rolly Romero winning the vacant “world” welterweight title in his divisional debut against Ryan Garcia, who was also making his divisional debut.
• Noel Reyes Cepeda picking up the “gold” super bantamweight belt by beating Nehomar Cermeno, who was 44 at the time and had dropped four of his previous five.
• Muhammad Waseem claiming the “gold” bantamweight title just last month by knocking out 300th-ranked Winston Orono, whose previous two fights were at light flyweight.
• Elton Dharry earning the “gold” super flyweight belt with a win over unranked flyweight Dexter Marques in the prestigious Guyana Boxing Night.

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’re going to add a fourth, the interim champion, when Nonito Donaire fights Andres Campos in a couple weeks. Donaire has lost two straight. Campos is an unranked super flyweight.

That’s not the best one. The best one is at featherweight.

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.

He doesn’t 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. 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.

I will say this for Gilberto Mendoza and co.: at least their corruption is funny.