OPINION
Titleholder Jermall Charlo may be the most talented fighter in the stacked middleweight division. The problem? He has yet to prove it. And when he takes on Dennis Hogan on Saturday night at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, he won’t be any closer to doing so.
Both fighters made weight today. Charlo weighed in at 159¾ pounds and Hogan, with plenty of room to spare, at 158½ pounds.
Of course, Hogan (28-2-1, 7 knockouts) is a career junior middleweight who is making his debut at the 160-pound limit. That, in a nutshell, should tell you how difficult it has been for Charlo to match up with the top fighters at middleweight; he needed to entice a junior middleweight to step up as an opponent.
Granted, Hogan, an Irishman who resides in Australia, is coming off a controversial loss to Jaime Munguia in a match he appeared to have done enough to win. Hogan’s team immediately pursued a rematch, but Munguia’s brain trust had other ideas. Still, putting forth a convincing effort against a defensively porous fighter like Munguia (perhaps one of the most overrated titleholders in recent memory) is one thing; doing it against a fighter of Charlo’s caliber is an altogether different proposition.
Indeed, a Charlo (29-0, 21 KOs) victory is hardly in doubt, but it’s not clear what it will do for the Houston native’s career. To wit, Charlo’s middleweight run has consisted of Jorge Sebastian Heiland, Hugo Centeno Jr., Matvey Korobov and Brandon Adams. Hardly breathtaking. Aside from the Korobov fight – one in which many observers had Korobov winning – many of Charlo’s fights at middleweight are little more than showcases.
In many ways, Charlo’s predicament bears some comparison to that of Terence Crawford, the welterweight titleholder who currently faces a dearth of quality opponents on his end of the stratified boxing landscape, over at Top Rank/ESPN. Most of the best welterweights fight under the Premier Boxing Champions banner, which does business exclusively with Showtime and Fox. Likewise, the other middleweight titleholders all fight exclusively on DAZN, including Canelo Alvarez, Gennadiy Golovkin and Demetrius Andrade, and it’s not clear whether Charlo can ever get those fights. That’s a shame considering Charlo built his name off of one of the most impressive knockouts in the past few years, his fifth round stoppage of Julian Williams, in what was his last fight at junior middleweight.
Surely, though, if the unification matchups are out of reach, there should be better options for Charlo than the likes of Hogan, Adams and Centeno. To that end, hard-hitting British contender Chris Eubank Jr., who fights Korobov on the same card Saturday night, may prove to be an attractive possibility. That fight would be intriguing and it would certainly sell, especially in Eubank’s native England. Moreover, Eubank would offer a far sterner test for Charlo than his recent opponents did. But there is no guarantee that Eubank even gets passed Korobov, a skilled, if somewhat shopworn southpaw who landed a surprising number of left hand leads against Charlo. Eubank has struggled with dexterous boxers in the past, namely Billy Joe Saunders and George Groves.
For Charlo, a Eubank win, at least in the interim, may represent the only meaningful step forward in his career.
Chris Eubank Jr and Matvey Korobov also made weight for their middleweight bout that will top the undercard. Eubank weighed in at 159 1/2 pounds, Korobov at 159.
Also, Marlon Tapales and Ryosuke Iwasa both weighed in at 121 1/2 pounds for their 12-round junior featherweight bout.