47 years.
That’s how long the flyweight division in boxing went between the time Salvatore Burruni was stripped of the WBA’s 112 pound belt, in an era when the WBC was still considered fledgling, and the first alphabet unification clash in the division.
2012 gave us Brian Viloria’s win over Tyson Marquez to unify the WBA and WBO belts, a pair of straps that stayed in tandem through the reign of Juan Francisco Estrada. Estrada’s reign ended in 2016. We’ve had no unification bouts in the division since but that changes this Saturday (DAZN, 8 PM EST).
It didn’t take 47 years this time.
London’s 27-year old IBF titlist Sunny Edwards (20-0, 4 KO) versus Texas’s 23-year old WBO titlist Jesse “Bam” Rodriguez (18-0, 11 KO) is another log on a fire of goodness in 2023. It’s got a little bit of everything. Stylist versus boxer-puncher; southpaw (Bam) vs. orthodox (Edwards).
Youth.
But what it also has is something that was incredibly difficult to put together for half a century. Unification is never easily done but it’s been easier in boxing’s glamor divisions. Welterweight has had multiple unification fights in every decade since the 1980s. Heavyweight has too. It makes sense. Those divisions have bigger audiences that bring the globe together.
Flyweight has often been plagued by geography.
Even with more belts around, the fights didn’t happen. During the lengthy WBC reign of Pongsaklek Wonjongjam for instance, the Thai battler bested the lineal consecutive title defense record of Miguel Canto with seventeen straight. At the same time, Argentina’s WBO titlist Omar Narvaez was defending 15 consecutive times.
They never met in the ring.
Stateside, relatively few noticed or cared because the flyweights they were most aware of were Nonito Donaire, Jorge Arce, and Vic Darchinyan and that was flyweight enough. Wonjongkam and Arce even both had their own versions of the WBC belt for a while, Arce of the interim variety.
What that meant was that there wasn’t a lot of being a world champion going on as much as there were regional attraction islands. Those who could carve out a living in their bubble carried on and no one was really offering the cash for more. There were moments of unification at strawweight, junior flyweight, and junior bantamweight, but the stars didn’t align at flyweight.
Viloria-Marquez changed that for a night and boxing’s streaming era has also produced the sort of global awareness of a fighter like Naoya Inoue to see him become the first undisputed bantamweight champion in nearly that division’s own half a century. In another generation, Edwards might never have been seen in the US and Rodriguez would be in the Darchinyan/Donaire role of being the rare flyweight boxing fans here recognize.
Boxing has, and will continue to have, its issues but the way streaming has shrunk the world isn’t one of them. From seeing fights that generated buzz on a delayed basis on platforms like YouTube, to the current atmosphere where DAZN and ESPN+ present boxing sometimes before the sun comes up, boxing has found ways to create demand that crosses geographic lines in new ways.
For Edwards, Rodriguez, and others their size, it means less lost time and lost generations. We never saw Wonjongkam face his real rivals in the division. Santos Laciar never got a chance to add the WBC belt when he was at his zenith. Mark Johnson-Yuri Arbachakov is as much a fantasy match today as it was when both were in their primes and holding titles.
Greatness is achieved in the ring against the best a division can offer. Flyweight has had more limited avenues than most other divisions to that special place with the immortals of the class like Jimmy Wilde, Fidel LaBarba, or Pascual Perez.
Even with each other, Edwards or Rodriguez might never ascend that high. Together, they get a chance to do more than most of their peers got a chance to do with more unification hopes possible over the horizon.
That’s a net plus for boxing, and the flyweight division.
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. He can be reached at roldboxing@hotmail.com