Beibut Shumenov will make another crummy defense of his WBA light heavyweight title, as the sanctioning body has for some reason signed off on Shumenov facing Enrique Ornelas instead of an actual contender, which will mark his third straight weak fight.
Shumenov (12-1, 8 KO) came into the sport with a lot of hype and some good marketing behind him in 2007, and by his third pro fight was taking on a decent journeyman, by his fourth fight a slightly better journeyman, and then he got into ex-titlists by his sixth pro fight, when he beat Montell Griffin.
But it appears as though the Kazakh fighter prefers to stay at about that level, as the progress stopped a long time ago and instead of a breakout, ambitious star, we're instead stuck with a 28-year-old bogus titlist who got his belt on a robbery win over Gabriel Campillo and has defended it against Vyacheslav Uzelkov, the remains of William Joppy, and Danny Santiago.
Ornelas (33-7, 21 KO) is a credible fighter but far from a contender for any world title, having won three straight over really bad competition following a loss to Robert Stieglitz in a shot at the WBA super middleweight belt in November 2010. He's a scrappy veteran, now 31, and the brother of Librado Andrade, who was recently knocked out of relevance for good by unknown Florida fighter Rowland Bryant.
To make matters worse, Ornelas is really a middleweight by trade, but I guess at least he's not 5'8" like Santiago. In a really annoying way, you can even argue that this is a "step up" from Joppy and Santiago. So that really tells you all you need to know about the direction of Shumenov's career, the value of boxing's title belts, and the sort of matchmaking you can probably expect long-term from Golden Boy's Fox Sports series, where this fight will be televised from the Hard Rock in Vegas.
Could we get a Cleverly-Shumenov eliminator? Not to face a real champion, but just an eliminator so we can figure out who to stop paying attention to for the time being.