Scott Quigg against Carl Frampton was first mentioned nearly five years ago and since then, to tell the truth, it has looked further and further away from ever happening.
The pair have been circling each other, threatening and swapping mild insults for a long time. The impasse at the negotiating table was infuriating to fans and both boxers showed their anger in various interviews -- they each hated the idea that people thought they were the one that was stopping the fight from happening.
Quigg won a sliver of the WBA's super-bantamweight title, kept winning on mainstream television and insisting he wanted the fight. It was his promotional team making all the headlines. Frampton won his IBF version of the super-bantamweight title, was fighting on BoxNation and he too insisting that he wanted the fight.
Frampton's version of events was simple: He was the star, a man capable of attracting 20,000 on a blustery night in the Belfast docks to watch him win the world title.
The men on the safe side of the ropes, each representing the interests of their boxer, went to war in private and public. This great British fight was lost, make no mistake, and both camps were left pointing fingers and screaming abuse at each other.
In Quigg's corner, Eddie Hearn made handsome offers. Millions of pounds were promised and still the fight went unsigned. It looked, let's be honest, like Frampton made a mistake in saying no.
In Frampton's corner, Barry McGuigan kept insisting that there was more to the story, more to the monster promised purses, and then Frampton left Belfast for America. It looked like Hearn had run out of aces in his shifting pack of mercurial deals.
This fight was not happening. Trust me.
Now, the genie of drained dreams has breathed some magic air into a fight that will be simply sensational. Everybody involved will take the credit for making it happen and the post-signature love-in has been a little overwhelming -- and a little too sweet for my tastes.
I prefer my warring parties, hated adversaries to remain on edge and keep the congratulations to a minimum.
I hope that somebody involved with the fight sends a nice box of Cohiba Esplendidos to the gentlemen in the Panama offices of the WBA. There was, it seems, a stumbling block with the status of Quigg as champion. He was once interim, he is now regular, but he needed to be super for the WBA to approve a fight with a champion from another sanctioning body.
However, a cold-hearted Cuban called Guillermo Rigondeaux was the WBA's super champion. He is a great fighter, so great that nobody wants to fight him. Anyway, the WBA decided that Rigondeaux had been inactive long enough and they changed his status to "champion in recess" and then upgraded Quigg from regular world champion to super world champion and that meant the fight could be made.
Hallelujah!
To be honest, I don't care what belt the two little battlers carry into the ring -- the fight should have been made a pound over the super-bantamweight limit, and that way the men and women in suits could have stayed at home, leaving the boxers simply to do what the fans have wanted for a long, long time: fight.
A fight this good does not need a gaudy bauble attached.
Buncey's Vaults
Eric Esch, aka Butterbean, weighed 23 stone for his fights. "Butterbean gets mean one hour before he fights. The talk in his trailer is about food and the Bean, as he is known, starts to plan his victory banquet even before a gentle squeeze allows him to put on his 56-inch shorts and saunter to the ring."
The Bean was getting closer to some sort of big fight. "Bean can cut a ring down with skill. However, his main flaw is his defence: he has none."
He wanted the best in the world, but only over four rounds. "'I'm the real thing over four rounds: Tyson, Holyfield and Foreman would not last four rounds with me,' he says."
He had unique motivation and it worked: "Bean's success is based on a dietary phobia -- he has to imagine the man in the opposite corner is trying to take food out of his mouth."
The Bean won 77 fights, 58 quick and last fought in 2013.
As reported in the Daily Telegraph on April 25, 1997