O’Shaquie Foster beat Emanuel Navarrete and walked straight onto The Ring’s pound-for-pound list at number 10. Floyd Schofield Sr is not buying the listing, the shortcut, or the idea that Foster’s road leads anywhere near his son. In this Mill City Boxing interview, the elder Schofield — father and trainer of the WBA lightweight champion — said the quiet part about modern rankings out loud: pound-for-pound used to be earned, and now, in his words, it is handed to people if they are popular.
Sr made the same point with Shakur Stevenson, and he was careful about how he made it. He is not saying Shakur lacks the skill to be a top guy — he is saying Shakur has not been given the chance to earn it yet, so ranking him beside a Terence Crawford, who went through division after division fighting champions, is a lie the list tells on itself. The Ring, Sr noted, is owned by somebody, and owned means programming: smoke and mirrors. His pound-for-pound is Crawford, full stop. Asked whether Shakur could beat Vasiliy Lomachenko, Sr waved the whole matchup off — Lomachenko is old, was beaten in his prime, and has been inactive so long that putting him in with a young, active champion would be an unfair fight, not a test.
On Foster himself, Sr’s demand was simple: fight somebody good, not somebody with a name — who actually earned the next shot at those belts? And when the host floated Foster, undisputed at 130, coming up to 135 as a favorite against his son, Sr shut it down. Foster was not going anywhere with his son, a smaller man coming from 130 against a kid Sr has watched in there with Shakur, with Teofimo Lopez, with all the great ones — a kid who was Shawn Porter’s sparring partner in camp for the Crawford fight. The timing kills it anyway: by Sr’s count it would take Foster a year and a half of campaigning to fight for titles at 135, and by then the Schofields will be at 140, where their conversation is the Russell brothers — the smaller one at 135 or the bigger one at 140, on their side of the street. Shakur at 140, Sr added, is not going to fight them, so they are not even looking there. Sr closed fair: he does not know Foster’s situation, Foster may be draining himself to make 130, and he wishes him well — bigger checks, family supported.
Our take: this is what standing on business sounds like from the champion’s corner. Greg Hackett told Mill City this week that Foster’s name keeps getting attached to other men’s roads — Sr just attached a timetable and a weight class to the same truth. Foster earned his belts in the ring. The pound-for-pound talk and the 135 talk are where the earning still has to happen.
Video credit: Mill City Boxing.
