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Canelo Alvarez, left, and Gennady Golovkin trade punches during a middleweight title boxing match on Sept. 15, 2018, in Las Vegas.Isaac Brekken/The Canadian Press

Within minutes of finishing their second epic fight on Saturday night, Canelo Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin began debating the parameters of their third.

The first encounter between these two men – each of whom can credibly claim he is the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world – ended in a draw. Alvarez won Saturday’s fight through a narrow and vaguely controversial decision.

Afterward, Golovkin said he would go again “under the right conditions” (i.e. ‘I’m not doing this for supporting-actor money any more’).

Alvarez took the same route – “If people want another round, I’ll do it again” (i.e. ‘Add a zero to my cheque’).

This should be simple. It never is.

The first rematch was cancelled after Alvarez failed a drug test and was given a six-month suspension. That encouraged Golovkin to demand a bigger cut of the purse. Although they had no leverage – their boxer couldn’t box – Alvarez’s camp tried to chisel Golovkin.

This high-stakes bickering went back and forth for months. There was more animus in the fight negotiations than the actual fight. It’s hard to figure since everyone involved makes out like bandits one way or the other (Alvarez earned something in the region of US$40-million for his night’s work; Golovkin about three-quarters of that).

Neither man can make anything close to those numbers fighting anyone else. Their legacies – the only thing that really matters to either of them – are intertwined. Neither may call himself the best of his generation until he has soundly defeated the other. That’s still (quite profitably) up in the air.

So what’s the problem? The problem is boxing’s institutionalized pettiness. Nobody can ever do the easy thing. Instead, it must always be hard.

This should be a good time for boxing. The sports world has become an endless haze of meaningless, regular-season games. People have never before been so primed to consume Big Events.

You will notice that if you begin playing road hockey on your street, a crowd will not gather to watch you do it. Now go out there and start punching each other in the face. You’ll need crash barriers to keep the mob back.

Boxing feels especially pertinent given the current political and cultural mood – which might be best described as the just barely pent-up desire to kill your neighbours. In Trump’s America, boxing should be king.

But boxing cannot make the boxing we want to see happen.

Currently, the two most exciting fighters in the world may be Vasyl Lomachenko and Mikey Garcia. Since they are both lightweights, it would make good sense that they fight each other. That’s how sports are supposed to work.

But that fight is not happening because Lomachenko’s promoter, Bob Arum, once handled Garcia’s career and it did not end well. It ended so poorly that Garcia was forcibly idled for more than two years. Arum is determined that should Garcia get the fight, he will do so on the worst possible terms. Garcia feels otherwise.

So there is the very real possibility that the two best lightweights of their generation – and possibly the two best boxers, full stop – will never meet.

It’d be like the owner of the Golden State Warriors refusing to let his team play against LeBron James because he once slighted him at a cocktail party. This is why the league office exists.

Boxing doesn’t have a league office. Instead, it has dozens of them, and none have any real power. They can mandate fights, but if the fighters don’t like the location, or their cut, or the look the other guy’s brother once gave him in a hallway, they will walk away and allow their belts to be stripped. There’s always another belt. In fact, there are far too many belts. No single one means anything any more.

This is all a form of financial cannibalism – the rich chewing off their own hind legs to spite the other predators.

You can’t say anything is ruining boxing. Boxing already did that. But this pathological inability to deploy common sense isn’t helping matters.

Like, why isn’t Anthony Joshua fighting Deontay Wilder soon? Tomorrow would be good.

Joshua is the most telegenic heavyweight champion since Muhammad Ali. He’s the perfect blend of cuddly and vicious. He should be Usain Bolt big. He should be the most famous athlete alive, fighting the biggest fights in the world.

But Joshua is none of those things. He’s a big deal in Britain because he’s British. But I doubt most casual sports fans elsewhere could pick him out of a crowd.

The obvious way to solve that problem would be to have him fight the second-best heavyweight in the world – Wilder.

Wilder is not cuddly. He’s actually seems a bit unhinged. Plus, he’s American. The storyline writes itself.

Instead, Joshua is fighting some Russian schlub you’ve never heard of next week, while Wilder will soon set a sanctioned bar brawl with Tyson Fury.

Joshua and Wilder may meet next spring, but we’ve heard that one before. Joshua’s been about to fight Wilder for more than two years and nothing ever comes of it. It’s maddening.

What do we get instead? Floyd Mayweather threatening to come out of retirement to fight Manny Pacquiao, in what I suppose will be the most in-demand pay-per-view presentation in the history of wheelchair boxing.

I quite enjoyed the first time they fought – although, in fairness, I was paid to be there. The fight was awful. No one wants to see them do that again.

But Mayweather instinctively understands boxing’s supply-side failures. It thrives on big names and big occasions, but cannot figure out how to manufacture enough of them.

Mayweather can provide the necessaries, even if it’s a fight no one cares about. They’ll come for the bad mouthing and stay for the preening.

I’ll give boxing this much. The problem with every other professional sport is extropy – they are in constant expansion, often pointlessly. Nobody needs more baseball. We already have too much.

Boxing’s issue is entropy – despite having the human material on hand to make its product, it’s dwindling. This is the end-stage of greed, when robbing the other guy of a few dollars begins to matter more than making them yourself.

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