NEW YORK – Whoever wins the lightweight title fight between champion Richard Commey and Teofimo Lopez on Saturday night at Madison Square Garden will have a lot more going on for him than just bragging rights or, in Lopez’s case, new hardware.
He’ll have a little something called momentum.
Commey-Lopez is not only the best on-paper matchup of the night, far exceeding the main event between welterweight titleholder Terence Crawford and Egidijus Kavaliauskas (we’ll get to that later). The winner could also go on to face Vasiliy Lomachenko in a unification of three of the four major lightweight belts next year. With apologies to newly minted lightweight titleholder Devin Haney, whose network allegiances make him a non-starter in this discussion, that is as about as good as it can get today in a sport beset by shoddy matchmaking and warring tribalism.
In other words, Commey-Lopez isn’t your typical boxing one-off that takes place in isolation, subject to a short half-life and a few forgettable column inches. No, its precise appeal is that it is freighted with significance beyond the 36 minutes (likely less) of combat that will unfold in the ring on Saturday night. And that’s a breath of fresh air, considering that the value of certain titleholders today are inseparable from the presumed significance of the particular alphabet-soup trinket they hold. One thinks immediately of WBO super middleweight titleholder Billy Joe Saunders and the WBO middleweight titleholder Demetrius Andrade, both of whom have fought virtually nobody of note to merit the high perch they occupy in their respective divisions.
Commey-Lopez is the latest brick laid down by promoter Top Rank toward what figures to be the edifice that will one day house the lightweight division’s most accomplished fighter. And the company did it by dutifully adding the most consequential 135-pounders, such as Ray Beltran, to their stable. They did it by scooping up Lopez from the 2016 Olympics, by getting in touch with Commey’s promoter Lou DiBella last year, by having Lomachenko outslug the likes of Pedraza and Luke Campbell (for a vacant title) earlier this year.
Commey-Lopez: Call it the big picture approach.
Alas, the same can’t be said for the fight that follows on Saturday night. Indeed, there is an air of banality surrounding titleholder Terence Crawford’s fight against undefeated Lithuanian contender Egidijus Kavaliauskas.
Even the fight’s usual carnival barkers seem to have caught on to this and have adjusted their brand of ballyhoo accordingly. Instead of selling Crawford-Kavaliauskas as a matchup of supreme consequence, they have sought to paint it as a rare opportunity to catch one of the great improvisers in the sport in action. During an ESPN segment, Teddy Atlas compared Crawford’s ring “instincts” to Jimi Hendrix riffing on the guitar, Bobby Fischer overlooking a chess board, and Louis Armstrong blowing the trumpet. “(Crawford) creates it as he does it,” Atlas said. “He’s got the greatest instincts I’ve ever seen.” Sitting beside Atlas, Max Kellerman, no stranger to rhetorical overkill himself, guffawed upon hearing that comment.
Actually, from a contemporary standpoint, Atlas isn’t entirely wrong. Few fighters have shown themselves to be as versatile and creative in the ring as Crawford. At some point, however, such claims must be born out in the ring against the very best.
Unfortunately, Crawford is Exhibit A in the ramifications wrought by the sport’s frustrating political divide. Unlike its lightweight stable, Top Rank simply does not have the key players at welterweight to fulfill on the promise of a generational talent like Crawford. Unlike Commey-Lopez, Crawford-Kavaliauskas doesn’t lead anywhere. There is no conceivable Lomachenko for Crawford waiting in the wings. Crawford’s best possible opponents – Errol Spence, Manny Pacquiao, Shawn Porter, Danny Garcia and Keith Thurman – are all aligned with Al Haymon’s Premier Boxing Champions, which understandably prefers to do their own round robin of fights. Moreover, whatever hope there was that the two sides could come together to stage a Crawford-Spence bout appears to have gone out the window in the wake of Spence’s harrowing car accident in October. At the very least, that fight is on the back-burner.
Crawford’s seemingly hamstrung future has had the effect of completely whitewashing his opponent, Kavaliauskas, a two-time Olympian who is known to crack with both hands. Kavaliauskas is no schlub, but his last fight, a draw against a distinctly mediocre Ray Robinson, did much to lower his stock. But Crawford, to be sure, is simply graded on a different scale. It is difficult to imagine what Kavaliauskas could bring to the ring that will trouble Crawford.
A saving grace for Crawford may be the current crop of elite junior welterweights who will all likely move up to 147 at some point, including Top Rank stablemate Jose Ramirez, Josh Taylor and Regis Prograis. But that development might take a year or more, which is an eternity for a fighter who is already 32 years old.
The difference with Hendrix and Armstrong? They were soloists whose virtuosities did not necessarily rely on anyone else. In boxing, they call that shadowboxing.