Spence-Ugas and the Welterweight Unification Wheel

This Saturday night on Showtime PPV (9 PM EST), two of the best welterweights in the world will lock horns to unify three titles in their weight class and narrow the championship field to just two men. One of those men, WBO titlist Terence Crawford (38-0, 29 KO), will play interested observer this weekend.

The other will be the winner decided between WBC/IBF titlist Errol Spence (27-0, 21 KO) and WBA titlist Yordenis Ugas (27-4, 12 KO). It’s a lot of hardware to carry.

Yes, there was a time when there were less champions in boxing. There was also a time when there was usually only one widely recognized champion per weight class.

Those days are getting farther behind us every day.

It’s been almost fifty years since the WBC and WBA belts were split during the second reign of Jose Napoles in 1975. It’s been over thirty years since the birth of the WBO and arguably at least close to twenty since that belt became fully embraced as a fourth co-equal with the WBC, WBA, and IBF straps.

How long is that for a status quo to be in place in boxing?

Consider this: the period when Ring Magazine, following the lead of the National Boxing Association, ranked only eight competitive weight classes in their pages lasted from 1932 to 1962.

Prior to that, flyweight fully emerged as the last of the ‘original eight’ weight divisions in roughly the second decade of the twentieth century. By 1920, the Walker Law had established the criteria for multiple other weight classes including a pair that gained some traction at the time like Jr. lightweight and Jr. welterweight.

The point is we’ve been in an era with four major sanctioning bodies for almost as long as boxing’s eight weight class heyday. The period of just WBA and WBC titles being regularly split was much shorter, really only around twenty years, before the birth of the IBF in the mid-1980s and the WBO a few years later.

In this morass of belts, there are surely parts of the audience that can get confused or at least exasperated. That’s why title unifications, even in the eyes of cynics who detest boxing’s title status quo, garner interest. Unification wasn’t unknown even in earlier eras but pronounced separations of almost every weight class have become boxing’s normal. Unification matches like Spence-Ugas provide a tonic, whittling things down and bringing clarity.

They exceed the norm.

Welterweight has been no stranger to unification matches and Spence-Ugas joins a memorable cadre since the Napoles title split in 1975. Lengthy reigns by Carlos Palomino (WBC) and Pipino Cuevas (WBA) in the second half of the seventies never resulted in a showdown. The two titles were finally unified in 1981 and boxing has ridden the wheel of separation and unification at welterweight ever since.

Spence-Ugas will join a list of unification showdowns this weekend, including:

•     1981 – Sugar Ray Leonard (WBC) TKO14 Thomas Hearns (WBA)
•     1984 – Donald Curry (WBA) UD15 Marlon Starling; Inaugural IBF
•     1985 – Donald Curry (WBA/IBF) KO2 Milton McCrory (WBC)
•     1991 – Simon Brown (IBF) TKO10 Maurice Blocker (WBC)
•     1999 – Felix Trinidad (IBF) MD12 Oscar De La Hoya (WBC)
•     2003 – Ricardo Mayorga (WBA) TKO3 Vernon Forrest (WBC)
•     2003 – Cory Spinks (IBF) MD12 Ricardo Mayorga (WBA/WBC)
•     2014 – Floyd Mayweather (WBC) MD12 Marcos Maidana (WBA)
•     2015 – Floyd Mayweather (WBC/WBA) UD12 Manny Pacquiao (WBO)
•     2019 – Errol Spence (IBF) SD12 Shawn Porter (WBC)

Getting unified doesn’t mean staying that way.

In almost all of these cases, the reigns of newly unified champions were brief. Leonard retired in 1982 and vacated the titles. Curry lost the undisputed crown to Lloyd Honeyghan. Honeyghan gave up the WBA belt and later the IBF belt was vacated. Brown gave up the IBF belt immediately after unifying two straps while Trinidad immediately moved up to Jr. middleweight.

Spinks held on to his three straps for a couple fights and those titles stayed unified until the aftermath of Carlos Baldomir’s upset of Spinks’ conqueror Zab Judah in 2006. Mayweather retired one fight after Pacquiao.

If Spence wins this weekend, he will join Curry and Mayweather in winning two unification fights and will join just Mayweather in defeating two reigning titlists to do it. It could set the stage for the long-awaited showdown with Crawford. If Spence were defeat Crawford, he could become the first welterweight to win three unification matches. While there might be too many belts for some, it would still be quite an accomplishment.

Spence will have to get by Ugas. An Ugas win could put the Cuban in line for Crawford meaning Ugas could have his own chance to join Curry and Mayweather. Either way, if the winner of Spence-Ugas faces Crawford in 2022, we will have the first calendar year with two welterweight unification bouts since 2003.

The unification wheel may not always turn fast, but it’s coming around again now. Enjoy the rotation.

Cliff Rold is the Managing Editor of BoxingScene, a founding member of the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board, a member of the International Boxing Research Organization, and a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America.