The American boxer Brandon Figueroa was stripped of his WBA featherweight title after hitting the scales 1.4 pounds over the 126-pound weight limit for Saturday's fight against Tomoki Kameda of Japan, organisers said on Friday. Reuters reported the decision in a dispatch carried by The Straits Times.
The fight was to go ahead as scheduled in Las Vegas. Kameda, 35, would be able to clinch the vacant title if he won it. If Figueroa won, the title would remain vacant.
Figueroa, 29, had clinched the featherweight title in February after beating the Briton Nick Ball in Liverpool. The Las Vegas bout was his first outing with the belt.
He arrived at the weigh-in 1.4 pounds heavier than the division allows, a margin of a little over one per cent of the 126-pound limit, and the belt was gone before either fighter had been in the ring. Organisers announced the decision on Friday, the day before the bout.
Kameda, who had not fought for 18 months, was unimpressed by the arrangement.
"Honestly, it's disrespectful, because I'm here, I suffered too. I did my thing. I'm ready for tomorrow," he said, speaking via a translator.
"It has been 18 months since I fought, but look at me, look how shredded I am. You know I'm ready. Everything remains the same, I'm going for the title tomorrow."
The bout did not take place. Figueroa withdrew on Saturday, the day of the fight, after falling ill overnight. “The previously scheduled Brandon Figueroa vs Tomoki Kameda bout is now off after Figueroa fell ill overnight,” his promoters and the event organisers, Premier Boxing Champions, said in a statement. Reuters reported the withdrawal.
Kameda wrote on social media that he had trained in Mexico for about two and a half months and had been ready to step into the ring in the best possible condition, and that he had agreed with the promoter and the WBA that he would be given priority for the next WBA featherweight championship decider. In the evening’s main event, Sebastian Fundora stopped Ermal Hadribeaj in the 12th round to defend his WBC super welterweight title.
Everything did not quite remain the same, because the belt had changed status on the scales rather than in the ring. Only one of the two men due to contest it was eligible to leave with it.
This is worth stating in full, because it is a rule of unusual elegance. A win for Kameda would have produced a champion. A win for Figueroa would have produced nobody. The title was therefore available to exactly one of the two fighters billed to contest it, and the other could at best retain the thing he had already lost, which was not the title but the fight.
The scales, on this reading, were the more decisive of the two contests, and the only one in which both men were eligible to win. They were also, in the event, the only one of the two that took place. Figueroa lost it by 1.4 pounds.
The Department of Unnecessary Research notes that boxing is in this respect ahead of other sports. It has designed a championship bout in which the defending champion cannot win the championship, cannot retain the championship, and is nonetheless the person the challenger has to beat to get it.
Kameda said that everything remained the same and that he was going for the title. He has been promised priority in the next contest to decide it. In the only contest that did take place, the champion was the only man eligible to lose.