Murat Gassiev vs Peter Kadiru – Worst Title Fight Ever?

Murat Gassiev will take on Peter Kadiru on July 11 in one of the most underwhelming Heavyweight world title fights of all time. Scheduled for broadcast on YouTube, its announcement left many boxing fans baffled and bemused.

Gassiev was elevated to full WBA Heavyweight champion after Oleksandr Usyk relinquished his WBA, WBC and IBF titles. Having previously been the WBA Regular Champion, Gassiev was given full champion status last week.

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While initially expected to fight Joe Joyce for the belt, Joyce was tied up in a fight with Artem Suslenkov, rendering him unable to take part. Instead, Kadiru was slotted in instead.

It got us think – is this the worst Heavyweight title fight of all time on paper? We took a look at some of the other worst title fights in history to find out – but before that, we’ll take a look at Gassiev and Kadiru’s existing records at Heavyweight.

Examining Murat Gassiev and Peter Kadiru

An absolute killer at Cruiserweight, Gassiev’s Heavyweight career has been much more underwhelming. He has been a part of boxing’s marquee division for six years now, but the only notable win he has is over an ancient Kubrat Pulev.

Wins over the likes of Mike Balogun, Kem Ljungquist and Carlouse Welch do little to capture the imagination, even if they were all knockouts.

On top of this, he also picked up a defeat against Otto Wallin, who has been comprehensively beaten by Anthony Joshua and Dereck Chisora in the years that have followed.

A slow, low-volume fighter who looks to set up his opponents for one big shot, Gassiev is simply too one-dimensional to keep up with the division’s top stars.

Then, there’s Peter Kadiru. We’re really not sure how he ended up in this position – he doesn’t have any notable wins on his record, with his most recent victory coming over Senad Gashi back in May.

He has one loss on his record, a first-round knockout against Marcos Antonio Aumada. For context, Aumada was stopped by Ariel Esteban Bracamonte last year, who himself was stopped by Dave Allen in 2018.

According to the WBA’s Heavyweight rankings, he isn’t even in the top 15. We understand that he is a late replacement for Tony Yoka, but why not give the shot to a ranked fighter? For example, Nelson Hysa, Vartan Arutyunyan and Jarrell ‘Big Baby’ Miller are all without an upcoming fight, yet haven’t been given the opportunity to fight Gassiev.

Granted, we don’t know the inner workings of these things, so we are speculating, but we doubt any of them would have rejected a world title fight – especially one that is so winnable.

Comparing Gassiev vs Kadiru to the other worst Heavyweight title fights

Just to be clear, we’re not looking at how bad the fights were in practice – we’re looking at how bad they were on paper. For example, Sultan Ibragimov vs Wladimir Klitschko could have been a good fight, but was deeply uninteresting when it was played out.

Likewise, Mike Tyson vs Michael Spinks promised to be an entertaining bout, but was over in less than half a round when Tyson pummelled the former light-heavyweight king.

For all we know, Gassiev vs Kadiru may well be a barn-burner – but, on paper, it’s a matchup that will struggle to inspire even the most hardcore of boxing fanatics.

No, we’re talking about fights such as Oleksandr Usyk vs Rico Verhoeven, which only happened a few months ago. We’ll give plenty of credit to Verhoeven for his heroic display, but few audiences gave him a chance in the lead up to the fight. Many thought it should have never have taken place – in many ways, it was a real black eye for professional boxing (and Usyk himself).

John Ruiz faced off against the much-maligned Nikolai Valuev in not one, but two equally-boring matchups, both of which went the distance. If you watched all 24 rounds of this, please, do something nice for yourself today. Furthermore, if you thought either of them would be exciting – are you ok?

Bruce Seldon vs Joe Hipp is also worthy of mention. Seldon had just defeated an aging Tony Tucker in an impressive showing, but had few impressive wins outside of this. Hipp, on the other hand, had even less to shout about at this stage of his career, with his best win coming against journeyman Jose Ribalta.