This is weird.

With Miguel Berchelt on the mend, the WBC ordered top contender Orlando Salido to face #5 Miguel Roman for an interim super featherweight title in the headlining bout of this Saturday’s HBO tripleheader. While the fight is still on, WBC prez Mauricio Sulaiman claims that HBO has mandated the fight be ten rounds, preventing it from being a title fight.

You can read Sulaiman’s histrionics here. My favorite line:

I wonder how will they look into the eyes of their fighters to explain that they will not be competing for the WBC green belt, that their fight is a simple 10-round fight with no meaning whatsoever. It will be like watching a pre-season game of the NFL.

As we all know, belts are the only things that give fights meaning.

Sulaiman claims that HBO did not give a reason for the switch, which should be taken with a massive grain of salt. To my knowledge, HBO has never been averse to attaching unnecessary titles to fights and, since it’s the main event and they control the amount of meaningless fluff between bouts, it doesn’t look like there’s a timing issue.

Sulaiman’s sobbing aside, why rob us of six more minutes of these violent little bastards beating the hell out of each other?