Shane Mosley: 'Embarrassment' that UFC shows more respect to women than boxing

Shane Mosley

Former multi-division champion Shane Mosley has added a women’s bout between “The Real Million Dollar Baby” Maureen Shea and Yulihan Avila to the card for his upcoming pay-per-view rematch with Ricardo Mayorga. While this normally wouldn’t be news in the MMA world, his reasoning is: Boxing just doesn’t respect women the same way as MMA.

“It’s an embarrassment to boxing that UFC and MMA show more respect to their woman fighters than the boxing world does, and it’s about time we caught up,” Mosley said in a press release announcing the bout. “I just hope the community gets behind me in this decision by buying the PPV and coming out to support at the Forum live.”

The press release references Mosley as someone “standing up for women in boxing” in light of the strides a fighter like Ronda Rousey  (12-0 MMA, 6-0 UFC) has been able to make in MMA.

While it may or may not be true that this move was the result of a desire to crush sexism in boxing, it is true that women’s boxing is nowhere near as healthy as women’s MMA. Despite brief attention brought to the sport by women such as Christy Martin, Laila Ali, Mia St. John and a few others, it has never held a featured place in the sport.

According to the press release, the fight between Shea (24-2) – who got her nickname by working with Hillary Swank to prepare Swank for her role in “Million Dollar Baby” – and Avila (12-2) will be the first women’s title fight on a boxing pay-per-view in over a decade.

There is some question over if the event will actually take place on August 29 at The Forum in Los Angeles as planned. Legendary boxing promoter Don King claims that he has a contract with Mayorga and has attempted to put a halt to the bout. Mosley says King’s documents for the claim are fraudulent and that the fight will go ahead as planned.

For more on the UFC’s upcoming schedule, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.