I'll be the first to admit it. When it comes to middleweights, I got spoiled early on. It was over 20 years ago that I accompanied Marvelous Marvin Hagler to London for his challenge to Alan Minter. There was a lot of early bloodshed, and Hagler won a surprisingly easy fight.
They had been selling beer by the crate at Wembley Arena that night, and when Minter's corner threw in the towel in the third round, the hooligans had plenty of leftover ammunition with which to demonstrate their displeasure. Some of them figured out that you can throw a full bottle of beer further, and more accurately, than you can throw an empty one.
Over the next seven years I covered all 14 championship fights in which Hagler participated, a giddy ride which finally ended with the controversial loss to Ray Leonard in Las Vegas, and Marvelous Marvin relocated to Milan, where he lives to this day. I'm sure the sportswriters who covered Sugar Ray Robinson's career felt the same way, but to me it seems evident enough that the middleweight division has never been the same.
For one thing, Hagler was truly the undisputed champion of his domain. When he beat Minter he held both the WBA and WBC titles, and when the IBF came along three years later, he held that one too. The supermiddleweight division had yet to be devised.
Without even attempting to suggest that another golden age of Middleweights is about to descend upon us, things are rather indisputably about to get more interesting. David Reid, the former WBA lightmiddleweight champion will make his debut as a full-fledged middleweight Sunday night at the Regent in Las Vegas.
A week from Friday, Bernard Hopkins, generally conceded to be the best of today's flock of 160lb champions, will defend his IBF title against the not-undeserving Antwun Echols at the Venetian, and should they both win, fellow Philadelphians Hopkins and Reid could be on a collision course for early next summer.
A night later, on December 2nd, a pair of undefeated light-middleweight champions, 36-0 Felix Trinidad (who beat Reid to win the WBA title) and 22-0 Fernando Vargas (IBF) will square off down the strip at the Mandalay Bay. The winner (and Trinidad is favoured) will presumably move up in weight to fight one the middleweight champions Don King has been carefully keeping from each other, while in a corollary move, undisputed light-heavyweight champion Roy Jones may be coming down in weight, beginning with a matchup against one of the extant super-middleweight champions.
In other words, within the next year we could conceivably see HopkinsReid, Trinidad-William Joppy, Jones-Joe Calzhage, Jones-Hopkins, and if everything goes according to plan, maybe even Jones-Trinidad.
That still might not add up to, say, Hagler-Hearns, but it's certainly a lot more intriguing than what's been going on for the past 12 years.
Reid's bout against Kirino Garcia, by the way, is no cakewalk. The Mexican has a career record of 28-201, which is unimposing unless you realise he started out by losing 18 fights in a row. Hopkins, on the other hand, has already handled Echols once and should again. Trinidad-Vargas is being touted as the Fight of the Year, a premise with which it is difficult to argue. Joppy is supposed to defend his WBA title in a supporting bout that night, but his originally-designated victim, Guillermo Jones, apparently can no longer make the weight. King is at this very moment scouring Los Bandidos' rankings for a suitably inept, but nonetheless ranked, opponent.
King has promotional rights to Trinidad and Joppy (WBC middleweight claimant Keith Holmes recently filed suit in an effort to emancipate himself from the promoter); Vargas fights for Main Events, and Reid for America Presents. Hopkins and Jones are promotional free agents, but all of the above are, or were, neatly tied together by their allegiance to Home Box Office, thus creating the feasibility of a single-elimination free-for-all to determine supremacy at the middle weights.
Jones remains the wild card in the entire scenario. His multi-year, multifight, multi-million-dollar contract with the cable network expired with September's defence against Eric Harding in New Orleans, leaving him a man with a solid claim to the title of world's best pound-for-pound boxer, but no one to prove it against.
Having more or less exhausted the world's supply of viable 175lb opponents, Jones had been coaxed into re-entering the 168lb wars. HBO even had a fight organised but negotiations broke down at the last minute, reportedly over Jones' last-minute demand for an extra $2 million.
Don't expect Jones to stay away from the table long. Once he gets a look at what will take place over the next 10 days, one suspects, he will be right back in the mix. The timing couldn't be better for a renaissance among middleweights.
