Amanda Serrano drops WBC featherweight belt as part of her 12-round 3-min campaign
Combat sports athletes understand the need to master the use their arms in order to strike their opponents as a fundamental skill.
Finally, there is a fighter who also understands the power of a pair of crossed arms.
In what could be interpreted as a transition from protest to mutiny on its way to what one day could become anarchy, current Ring magazine featherweight champion Amanda Serrano announced that she’s dropping her WBC belt due to the sanctioning body’s “(refusal) to evolve the sport for equality,” as expressed in a recent post on social media in response to the WBC’s refusal to sanction women’s boxing matches with 12 rounds of three minutes each.
The choice of “anarchy” as an adjective to describe Serrano’s intentions lays in the concept of “a man with his arms crossed is more powerful than a thousand men bearing arms,” a basic tenet of anarchism and its use of “direct action.”
And as radical as it may sound, it may be just what boxers need in order to unshackle themselves from the tyranny of the Three Percent Gang, the group of four major sanctioning bodies who hold lavish conventions every year where delegates from around the world gather to finally end up agreeing on one thing: the world needs more boxing title belts, and they need to pay us three percent of their purses every time they fight for one of those.
Amanda Serrano sought the help from fellow boxing stars ahead of their 12-round title bout.
Serrano, emboldened by the recent support of her peers in her recent title fight against Danila Ramos, has now chosen to drop the WBC trinket due to the organization’s refusal (at least for the time being) to sanction that title bout with twelve three-minute rounds, which is the way the fight ended up happening.
The fight ended in a masterful win by Serrano in which she also defended the other three belts (IBF/WBA/WBO) at stake as well, and with several former and current female champs and contenders supporting the cause either from ringside or by co-signing to her request in the form of a joint manifesto.
The success of her initiative has now motivated Serrano to take it all up a notch.
“Moving forward if a sanctioning body doesn’t want to give me and my fellow fighters the choice to fight the same as the men, then I will not be fighting for that sanctioning body,” said Serrano in her social media post.
After reminding the world of her numerous accomplishments in boxing and thanking the sanctioning bodies who accommodated her request, Serrano signaled that she is ready to continue her championship run only in this format going forward.
“If you want to face me in the ring, you have a choice,” said Serrano. “I’ve made mine.”
Beyond the 12×3 controversy and its possible outcomes, what would be interesting to see is whether the women’s boxing community, notoriously underpaid as they are in comparison to their male counterparts, chooses one day to ditch most of the alphabet soup organizations in favor of just one belt, which would mean just one sanctioning fee among other things – or none at all, if that belt is the one offered by The Ring.
Is this where boxing could be headed?
I say hell yeah.
And just like in that old French revolution masterpiece by Eugene Delacroix, I say we should let a lady lead the way.
Diego M. Morilla writes for The Ring since 2013. He has also written for HBO.com, ESPN.com and many other magazines, websites, newspapers and outlets since 1993. He is a full member of the Boxing Writers Association of America and an elector for the International Boxing Hall of Fame. He has won two first-place awards in the BWAA’s annual writing contest, and he is the moderator of The Ring’s Women’s Ratings Panel. He served as copy editor for the second era of The Ring en Español (2018-2020) and is currently a writer and editor for RingTV.com.
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