Friday night on ESPN+ all the makings for a good laugh were available from Montreal, Canada.
An unneeded division would have its first needed champion, one of the two fighters could be described with the term "Untested" as quite the weak word and with the fight being held in what appeared to be in your local movie theatre with tables for dinner, everything was available for a chuckle at the expense once again of Mauricio Suliaman and his WBC.
However, as boxing often does, it delivered a very fun fight as Oscar Rivas won the initial Bridgerweight title with a close unanimous decision over a literal unknown in Ryan Rozicki.
The Bridgerweight division is the latest goofy idea from the WBC, the people that give you open scoring, twelve round title fights, and franchise champions, and has been created for fighters from 200 to 224 pounds in an attempt to give smaller heavyweights a level playing field (from the WBC) and add cash to the coffers of the WBC (From TRS) from more sanctioning fees.
While boxing needs more titles and divisions like Hawaii needs sunshine and of course just like in the cruiserweight division, Rivas immediately said that he was open for business for a heavyweight fight should one arise, which defeats the purpose of a division for smaller heavyweights.
And when you look at the ratings of non-entities and journeymen in the top 15, other than former title challenger Bryant Jennings, who was scheduled to fight Rivas but could not get into Canada after he refused a Covid-19 vaccine, aging cruiserweight champion Marco Huck, and perhaps entertaining prospect Alen Babic, you wonder how anyone will mildly care about this decision.
After Jennings pulled out, the WBC desperate to have the title filled so it can start sucking money from it, allowed an undefeated and unqualified Rozicki to fight Rivas, who has lost only once in his career to Dillian Whyte in a fight that Rivas drop Whyte in round nine, with Rozicki's main qualification being that he lives in Canada and would be the easiest fighter to replace Jennings.
This absolutely meant that Rozicki would fight very well to the surprise of Rivas and give an entertaining fight to the fans and the viewers around the world before losing the decision of 115-113 (our scorecard) and two scores of 116-112.
The decision, you may ask?
Well with two minutes to go in a very good fight, ESPN+ lost its feed and gave everyone minutes of a soccer ball being inflated (really) on screen and we never did actually hear the decision.
A much better fight than expected and I don't know where the fighters go next, although the next highest faux contender is Evgeny Romanov and Bryant Jennings might be able to get the next fight due to the circumstances.
Everything about this pointed to being a clown show and being boxing, the fight itself was the best part of the evening.
In the boxing challenge, Ramon Malpica earned two points to my for the Rivas win to move the total to 141-122.
Ramon chose Rivas via unanimous decision, while I picked Rivas via eighth-round KO.
I hope to have time for a preview of tonight's Jamel Herring-Shakur Stevenson fight later today,
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