Richard Schaefer and Kalle Sauerland are the TSS 2019 Promoter(s) of the Year

The founders and promoters of the World Boxing Super Series, Richard Schaefer and Kalle Sauerland, are the 2019 TSS Promoter(s) of the Year.

Who else would it be?

Boxing would have decidedly much less interesting over the course of the past 12 months had not the architects of the WBSS, Schaefer and Sauerland, continued their effort to put boxing politics aside and bring together the best fighters available from specific weight classes for single-elimination tournaments designed to crown the best overall fighter in the division.

“The World Boxing Super Series will create the next superstars in world boxing,” Sauerland said back in 2017 after the first season of the tournament was announced. “This tournament does not detract from the day-to-day nature of boxing, but it is completely the way forward for the sport.”

Kalle Sauerland and “Associates”

Two years and the same number of WBSS tournaments later, Sauerland’s words seem prophetic in hindsight. How else besides this forward-thinking boxing tournament might the meteoric rise of eventual tournament winners Oleksandr Usyk and Naoya Inoue have happened without this great idea, and, perhaps more importantly, the tenacious follow-through it must have taken to get it done?

I’ll tell you how. Either very slowly or not at all. Because boxing careers outside the confines of the WBSS are moved painstakingly slow.

So, the WBSS is the best thing to happen in boxing in a long time. The fact that seemingly nobody else in the sport had the idea before Schaefer and Sauerland illustrates another important point.  Boxing’s most glaring need as a culture is to more fully embrace possible paths up the mountain that might carry the sport into a bold new future.

Richard Schaefer

This year’s tournaments included fantastic fields in the bantamweight, junior lightweight and cruiserweight divisions. Some of the best fighters in the sport were involved, including bantamweights Naoya Inoue, Nonito Donaire and Ryan Burnett, junior welterweights Josh Taylor and Regis Prograis, and cruiserweights Mairis Briedis, Yunier Dorticos and Krzysztof Głowacki.

Perhaps even more impressive is that Fight of the Year candidates seemed to consistently unfold during the WBSS in 2019. Josh Taylor’s defeat of Regis Prograis in October at London’s O2 Arena to unify world titles in the 140-pound division was an old-school, throwback scrap between two undefeated world champions itching to prove they belonged at the highest levels of the sport. Both men certainly did that.

And some believe the bantamweight dustup between rising pound-for-pound superstar Naoya Inoue and future Hall of Famer Nonito Donaire in November in Japan might have been the even better fight. Who could have predicted such a valiant effort from the 37-year-old Donaire against arguably the hardest-hitting knockout puncher pound-for-pound this side of Deontay Wilder?

Theoretically, these great fights could have been made without the WBSS, but that’s long been the problem in the sport full of great fighters but short of great fights made between them: Fights like these usually don’t get made.

Both 2019 tournament winners, Taylor and Inoue, were served greatly by their participation. The same could be said of Donaire whose effort summoned forth a greater appreciation of his great career. Perhaps the most amazing part about the whole deal is that the rising tide of the WBSS surely seems to lift all ships.

Because here is boxing in its finest form. For those who are brave enough, it’s a clear path toward divisional supremacy–one that reveals the very best things about the most daring fighters the sport has to offer.

That isn’t to say the endeavor has gone perfectly smooth. If anything, the fact that little hiccups have come up along the way proves just how massive in scope the WBSS truly is among boxing’s other big events.

From the reported storyline that the tournament was on the verge of collapsing over the summer over financial issues, to the relative slow move of some of the tournament brackets because locations, dates, and everything around the fights themselves have to be sorted out, nothing as starkly different as the WBSS has been launched among the stodgy old-world politics of boxing without running into a few problems.

For instance, the WBSS cruiserweight final is still waiting on a date and location to be set for the semi-final winners who earned their places back in June, Mairis Briedis and Yunier Dorticos.

Briedis, by the way, was stripped of his WBC belt for choosing to stay the course over mindlessly following the orders of a sanctioning organization that would rather keep those fees coming back to them all year long than wait for the WBSS to set a date.

Perhaps, though, such a turn of events fits our current narrative quite nicely.

Because how much longer might it take for everyone in boxing to realize that the prize the WBSS offers, both in terms of money and historical prestige, is worth much more to a fighter in the long run than the constantly growing number of alphabet belts spread throughout the boxing world could hope to be?

And how many more fighters will have to turn into stars right before our very eyes until the alphabet gangs realize what might happen in the long run if they don’t start getting their acts together?

Whatever the case, one thing is clear to us at TSS after a reviewing the WBSS’s 2019 campaign: Those two guys who created it and run the thing are geniuses, and there was no better job done by anyone in the sport last year of promoting fighters, fights and boxing as a culture.

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