Anthony Joshua was slightly the heavier man than Daniel Dubois as the heavyweights weighed in for their world title fight on Saturday. on Saturday Anthony Joshua and Daniel Dubois will meet in the ring before more than 90,000 screaming fans at Wembley Stadium. It’s a quality match-up between two good fighters. But once again, boxing’s powers that be have chosen short-term gain over the long-term health of the sport by marketing Joshua-Dubois as a fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. The heavyweight champion of the world is Oleksandr Usyk. He earned that designation by beating Joshua twice, knocking out Dubois, and winning a split decision against Tyson Fury in a fight to unify the division titles this past May. The unification of the four major sanctioning body belts is the most significant boxing-related accomplishment to date conducted under the auspices of Turki Alalshikh, the director of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority. But looking for positive branding in the United Kingdom and hoping to promote a “Riyadh Season” event that doesn’t lose tens of millions of dollars, the Saudis are joining with Eddie Hearn and Frank Warren, who promote Joshua and Dubois respectively, to fragment the heavyweight crown again. Silver goes on to explain that, in the 1930s, a group of state athletic commissions joined together to form the National Boxing Association. Eventually, the NBA consisted of 43 state commissions, although New York (the most powerful commission in the country) wasn’t among them. When Mickey Walker gave up the middleweight title to campaign as a heavyweight, the NBA held a tournament to determine a successor. And it instituted a sanctioning fee for championship fights. The fee was one dollar. Boxing has four major sanctioning bodies: the World Boxing Council, World Boxing Association, World Boxing Organization and International Boxing Federation. In this instance, the IBF belt has been pried from Usyk as a consequence of his choosing to fight a contractually mandated rematch against Fury in December rather than meet a less deserving “mandatory challenger” who he has already knocked out. The mandatory challenger is an opponent who a champion is required to fight or vacate his title. The concept arose out of abuses in a long-ago era when boxing had eight weight classes with one champion in each division. “It used to be that a fighter got a title shot by beating the other best fighters around,” says boxing historian Mike Silver. “But the system didn’t always work, especially not for Black fighters. Charley Burley never got a title shot. Archie Moore waited for years and had to sign with [manager] Jack Kearns before he got an opportunity.” The NBA also instituted a mandatory challenger system. One of the first fighters it stripped was Sugar Ray Robinson. In 1959, Robinson fought just once (against a club fighter named Bob Young, who he knocked out in two rounds). And the NBA stripped him of his title for refusing to fight a return bout against Carmen Basilio. After that, only the New York and Massachusetts commissions recognized Robinson as middleweight champion and he lost to Paul Pender in his next fight.