Anthony Joshua, Daniel Dubois and boxing’s broken mandatory challenger system

On Saturday Anthony Joshua and Daniel Dubois will meet in the ring before more than 90,000 screaming fans at Wembley Stadium. It’s a quality match-up between two good fighters. But once again, boxing’s powers that be have chosen short-term gain over the long-term health of the sport by marketing Joshua-Dubois as a fight for the heavyweight championship of the world.

It isn’t.

Related: Undisputed heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk released after Poland detention

The heavyweight champion of the world is Oleksandr Usyk. He earned that designation by beating Joshua twice, knocking out Dubois, and winning a split decision against Tyson Fury in a fight to unify the division titles this past May. The unification of the four major sanctioning body belts is the most significant boxing-related accomplishment to date conducted under the auspices of Turki Alalshikh, the director of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority. But looking for positive branding in the United Kingdom and hoping to promote a “Riyadh Season” event that doesn’t lose tens of millions of dollars, the Saudis are joining with Eddie Hearn and Frank Warren, who promote Joshua and Dubois respectively, to fragment the heavyweight crown again.

Boxing has four major sanctioning bodies: the World Boxing Council, World Boxing Association, World Boxing Organization and International Boxing Federation. In this instance, the IBF belt has been pried from Usyk as a consequence of his choosing to fight a contractually mandated rematch against Fury in December rather than meet a less deserving “mandatory challenger” who he has already knocked out.

The mandatory challenger is an opponent who a champion is required to fight or vacate his title. The concept arose out of abuses in a long-ago era when boxing had eight weight classes with one champion in each division.

“It used to be that a fighter got a title shot by beating the other best fighters around,” says boxing historian Mike Silver. “But the system didn’t always work, especially not for Black fighters. Charley Burley never got a title shot. Archie Moore waited for years and had to sign with [manager] Jack Kearns before he got an opportunity.”

Silver goes on to explain that, in the 1930s, a group of state athletic commissions joined together to form the National Boxing Association. Eventually, the NBA consisted of 43 state commissions, although New York (the most powerful commission in the country) wasn’t among them. When Mickey Walker gave up the middleweight title to campaign as a heavyweight, the NBA held a tournament to determine a successor. And it instituted a sanctioning fee for championship fights. The fee was one dollar.

The NBA also instituted a mandatory challenger system. One of the first fighters it stripped was Sugar Ray Robinson. In 1959, Robinson fought just once (against a club fighter named Bob Young, who he knocked out in two rounds). And the NBA stripped him of his title for refusing to fight a return bout against Carmen Basilio. After that, only the New York and Massachusetts commissions recognized Robinson as middleweight champion and he lost to Paul Pender in his next fight.

The NBA wasn’t perfect but there was a semblance of fairness to it. Then, in the early-1960s, the NBA evolved into the World Boxing Association and world sanctioning body “politics” took hold.

The world sanctioning bodies today are motivated by making money for the private interests that control them. Promoters subsidize the organizations by paying to attend sanctioning-body conventions where they lobby for preferential treatment for their fighters, purchasing advertisements in sanctioning body journals, and the like. But the sanctioning fees paid for fights constitute the world sanctioning bodies’ greatest source of income.

The public is familiar with the sanctioning fees paid for world championship bouts. But fighters also pay sanctioning fees to fight for regional belts that move them up the ladder to “elimination bouts” and “box-offs” that then enable them to become a mandatory challenger. Without the mandatory designation to reach for, many of these sanctioning fees would disappear and market forces (including fan preferences) would dictate who champions fought .

Mandatory defenses – or the refusal to fight in them – can have a big impact. The most famous example of a fighter being stripped for not fighting a mandatory defense occurred in 1978 when the World Boxing Council stripped Leon Spinks of his title and proclaimed mandatory challenger Ken Norton “heavyweight champion of the world” after Spinks declared his intention to fight a rematch against Muhammad Ali. Norton was aligned with Don King (who had close ties with WBC president Jose Sulaiman). The Ali-Spinks rematch was promoted by Bob Arum. Those alliances were widely believed to have factored into Sulaiman’s thinking.

Mandatory challenger designations also impact smaller fights. Promoter Russell Peltz recalls how, years ago, the WBA made bantamweight champion Jeff Chandler fight a mandatory defense against Miguel Iriarte (who came from Panama, where the WBA was headquartered). Iriarte had achieved mandatory status without ever fighting quality opposition. His previous three fights had been against opponents who finished their ring careers with a composite record of zero wins against 11 losses. Chandler toyed with Iriarte and knocked him out in the ninth round.

Mandatory defenses become even more of an issue when a fighter (such as Usyk) has earned all four belts, has four sanctioning bodies demanding mandatory defenses of him, and can’t fight often enough to satisfy everyone. In that regard, former unified heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis recently declared, “When you put all the belts together, a lot of the promoters don’t like that because all the belts are in one place and they don’t get to bring their guy around to make money. For them, it is better that they’re split up. For the organizations, they don’t want that either. They want to be able to move [their belts] around. The only ones who want undisputed are the guys who are boxing for it and working towards it.”

Dubois followed a circuitous route to become the IBF’s mandatory challenger. He suffered his first loss in 2020 at age 23 when he chose to not continue against Joe Joyce after suffering a fractured left eye socket. That decision was understandable given the nature of the damage involved. More problematically, trailing badly on the judges’ scorecards in round nine of a title fight against Usyk last year, Dubois took a knee and quit.

Dubois returned from his loss to Usyk to stop a grossly out-of-shape Jarrell Miller in Riyadh in 10 rounds. Then, on 1 June of this year, he fought Filip Hrgovic (then the IBF’s mandatory challenger), also in Riyadh. Hrgovic has a less-than-stellar resume. Dubois knocked him out in the eighth round.

That made Dubois the IBF’s new mandatory challenger. And despite Dubois having held that position for only a few weeks, the IBF demanded that Usyk fight Dubois for the second time in his next outing (which the Ukrainian couldn’t do because of his contractually mandated rematch against Fury). So on 25 June, Usyk relinquished the IBF belt.

Alalshikh could have intervened to keep Usyk from losing the IBF title. As things now stand, most powers in boxing are bending at the knee for Saudi money. His Excellency (as Alalshikh is known) could simply have said, “In the future, the General Entertainment Authority won’t deal with any sanctioning body, promoter, or fighter who is involved with a heavyweight championship fight for the vacant IBF belt.” But as noted above, branding Joshua-Dubois as a world championship fight suits the Saudis’ purposes.

Dubois has now been designated as the IBF “heavyweight champion” without ever having won an IBF championship fight. Technically, Joshua is the “challenger”, although in reality AJ is the A-side of the promotion and a 4-to-1 betting favorite. Formally, the fight is being marketed as a fight for the IBF heavyweight championship of the world. But “IBF” is often dropped from the chatter to propagate the view that this is for the heavyweight crown.

The winner of Joshua-Dubois has been expected to challenge the winner of Usyk-Fury II for the heavyweight throne. But there’s many a slip twixt cup and lip. Alalshikh said recently that, if Joshua wins, he’d like to match AJ against Fury next even if Tyson loses to Usyk for a second time.

Meanwhile, the IBF will get a huge sanctioning fee from Joshua-Dubois.