When it comes to big-time professional boxing, there are different levels and categorizations within the sub-genre of what fans and experts often refer to as “superfights.”
There’s the curiosity kind, of course, like next month’s Mike Tyson-Jake Paul circus, which is designed to wake up every casual fan you know, from grandmas to pre-teens, and everyone in between. And then there are fights like Saturday’s can’t-miss offering in the light heavyweight division when Artur Beterbiev (20-0, 20 KOs) and Dmitry Bivol (23-0, 12 KOs) square off in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Both of these Russian-born fighters are anything but household names outside of boxing. And getting either one to say a bad word about each other — or even a prediction as to how they might win the fight — is similar to attempting to derive blood from a stone.
The best news, however, is that none of that even remotely matters.
This matchup, which is set to crown the first four-belt, undisputed champion at light heavyweight, has so much more to do with history and the celebration of two greats finally doing battle in a true, 50/50 fight for 175-pound supremacy than it does anything superficial like social media bragging rights.
This is boxing at its very best.
And the closer one looks at the matchup of Bivol, 33, putting his WBA title at stake against the WBC/WBO/IBF crowns of the battle-tested Beterbiev, the more one realizes that, in terms of the stakes, this is potentially about even more than the coveted undisputed title during this era of proliferated (and often meaningless) titles.
During an already gluttonous stretch of all-time great boxers vying for supremacy atop the pound-for-pound rankings, where upwards three fighters (Oleksandr Usyk, Terence Crawford and Naoya Inoue) hold legitimate arguments for the top spot, Beterbiev-Bivol has an opportunity to not just crash the P4P party but potentially overtake it.
With both fighters sitting at the back end of the top 5 of most lists (including CBS Sports), there’s no greater achievement from a P4P standpoint than to defeat a fellow top-5 opponent in a truly great matchup like this that pairs two unbeaten champions against one another. Not only are both looking to add the cherry on top of their respective resumes and legacies, the winner just might be able to stand alone after the fight as the best boxer in the entire sport.
And even if a cynical fan might point out the unavoidable fact that Beterbiev, who fights out of Montreal, is already 39 and is entering the fight fresh off of knee surgery that delayed its original date, even that doesn’t take away from the expectations of what Saturday might bring.
“If I have some problem [with my knee], the medical commission would not let me to go and fight,” Beterbiev told CBS Sports last week. “If I am here, I am ready to fight. I believe that everything happened at the right time. During this time, we did a couple of fights for unification [in recent years]. We did not stay sitting on the chair and waiting for this fight.”
From a modern historical standpoint, Beterbiev-Bivol belongs in the same sentence as recent unification superfights involving established, unbeaten champions like Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao (2015), Andre Ward-Sergey Kovalev I (2016), Crawford-Errol Spence Jr. (2023) and Usyk-Tyson Fury (2024).
