The champion’s father has the belt in the house now, and he is talking like it.
Floyd Schofield Sr. was back on Mill City Boxing this week — his regular pulpit — and the two names at the top of the agenda tell you exactly where the lightweight division’s real power sits right now: Abdullah Mason, and the wreckage of Shakur Stevenson vs. Devin Haney.
Video credit: Mill City Boxing.
Start with Mason. His name keeps getting attached to Floyd “Kid Austin” Schofield’s — the young, heavy-handed contender the division’s matchmakers would love to feed to a new champion. The Schofield camp’s position has been consistent all week, and Sr. has never been one to soften it: Mason is a good young fighter, but the camp is not building its reign around anybody else’s timeline. When Sr. and his son sat down with Fight Hub TV days ago, they shut the Mason fight down as a priority and pointed at the road that actually builds a legacy — William Zepeda, and unification above everything. A father’s job on a microphone like this is to make sure nobody mistakes politeness for availability.
Then there is the Haney–Shakur collapse, which fell apart in public the same week — 145 agreed, then a rehydration clause, then a lawyer’s email demanding 147, then both champions blaming each other for six wasted months. Nobody in boxing is better placed to enjoy that mess than the Schofields, and nobody has earned the right to comment on it more. While those two were negotiating with themselves, Kid Austin took the hard fight in front of him, beat Lucas Bahdi, and brought home the WBA lightweight title — the same belt Gervonta Davis left behind rather than defend it against him, if you ask Sr., and the record of who showed up and who didn’t backs his version.
That contrast is the whole story of the lightweight division in October 2026. At the top you have two champions with every promotional machine in the sport behind them, who cannot get a contract signed between them. And you have a 23-year-old champion from Austin whose camp calls its shots out loud, takes the fights offered, and is already talking about unifying.
We’ve backed the Schofield camp on this site because the record keeps agreeing with them. Mason, Zepeda, a unification — whichever door opens first, the address doesn’t change. The belt is in Austin. Anybody who wants it knows where to knock.
This is the same Sr. who said Tank vacated rather than face his son.
