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Jermell Charlo cannot understand how he doesn’t occupy a spot on every person’s pound-for-pound list by this point.
The 31-year-old Charlo owns the IBF, WBA and WBC 154-pound championships, has embraced the most difficult fights within his division and could become its first fully unified champion in the four-belt era Saturday night. Houston’s Charlo (34-1, 18 KOs) also knocked out former WBC champion Tony Harrison in December 2019 to avenge his only professional loss – a controversial 12-round, unanimous-decision defeat in December 2018.
Charlo claims that the omissions of him and his twin brother, unbeaten WBC middleweight champ Jermall Charlo, on those lists have more to do with their personalities than their skills and resumes. He debated reporters regarding that matter during a virtual press conference recently to promote his 12-round unification fight against Argentina’s Brian Castano on Saturday night at AT&T Center in San Antonio (Showtime; 9 p.m. ET).
“We’re not liked fighters,” Charlo said. “We’re not the fighters that you would, you know, it’s because of who we are, I guess, you know, the things about us and certain things. You know, I guess you gotta win ‘em over. The skills been paying the bills, like I said before. But because of the personalities and the demeanors that the Charlos [have], and being a twin, you know, I guess some of those things like that, because it’s two of us.
“You know, and everybody don’t got a twin, so it make you not like the twins. So, you know, like we do put the fight on and we make sure that we bring it all. We put our balls on the line, dog. Our family is in front of us and we gotta make sure that we feed ‘em.”
BoxingScene.com lists Charlo seventh among its top 10 pound-for-pound. He is not ranked in the top 10 by ESPN.com or The Ring magazine.
“I get it,” Charlo said. “You know, we speak our minds. We say what we wanna say. And if there was another Jermell Charlo around, I’d probably be having a grudge against him as well. So, it’s OK to understand that, you know, everybody in this world, it don’t matter if they like you. If you’re not of this world, you’re not supposed to worry about what they think or feel about you anyways.”
Castano (17-0-1, 12 KOs), the WBO junior middleweight champion, is not ranked in the top 10 by BoxingScene.com, ESPN.com or The Ring.
Nevertheless, a victory over Castano would establish Charlo as just the sixth fully unified champion in any division during boxing’s four-belt era. Retired middleweights Bernard Hopkins and Jermain Taylor, junior welterweights Terence Crawford and Josh Taylor and cruiserweight Oleksandr Usyk are the only five fighters to have earned that distinction.
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.