Carl Frampton hijacked the grand plans of the brilliant Leo Santa Cruz on Saturday night with a stunning win in New York.
Frampton of Northern Ireland was the underdog, the challenger, moving up in weight and away from home, but he fought with incredible intelligence to take Santa Cruz's WBA featherweight title.
Santa Cruz was unbeaten in 33 fights. The Frampton fight was his 12th in four years for a world title and he had a long list of future opponents. Santa Cruz was destined for, and had been selected for, dominance and continued lucrative TV fights; nobody told Frampton before the first bell.
Ringside at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, the champions and potential future challengers watched the brilliant Frampton use his brain to take rounds and then take the belt. Santa Cruz talked about a rematch, possibly in Los Angeles, and that could happen. However, he looked broken by the loss and will need to answer a few harsh questions about his lack of tactics.
Lee Selby, the IBF featherweight champion from Barry Island in Wales, was an excited ringside guest. "It was a great performance and I would love a fight with Carl," he said. That fight is certainly feasible, as the pair shares the same adviser in Al Haymon.
Every single world featherweight champion, the leading contenders and all of the best super bantamweights will now want a fight with Frampton. Both Frampton and Santa Cruz are refugees from the super bantamweight division, men who simply needed the extra 4 pounds in weight to allow them to continue fighting.
On Saturday night Frampton, 29, took a huge step toward stardom, and the look on the faces of those in the Santa Cruz business was priceless. Frampton is now an attraction in America, but he has a lot of lucrative options in Britain and Ireland.
A partial unification with Selby would do stunning business outdoors in Belfast, as would a rematch with the British Scott Quigg, another ringside spectator to the Frampton show. In February at a sold-out venue in Manchester, and in a big pay-per-view fight on Sky, Frampton broke Quigg's jaw and took his unbeaten record as well as his WBA super bantamweight title.
Frampton also trousered £1.5 million, phenomenal money for small men in any country and at any time. A rematch in Belfast would work -- Quigg wants it and it proves that British world champions are not dependent on the American market.
The new WBO champion at featherweight, Oscar Valdez, who is unbeaten in 20 fights with 18 knockouts, would pose a fight that could top any bill in Las Vegas. A fight with the technically gifted WBC incumbent Gary Russell Jr. is another realistic option.
"We will look at all the champions, the leading contenders and other fighters -- Carl is suddenly very popular," insisted Barry McGuigan, who is Frampton's promoter and mentor. McGuigan won the same WBA featherweight belt 30 years and 13 champions ago. He was in tears at the end.
There is another option -- one that is admittedly very unlikely but is possibly going to keep on surfacing -- and that is the brilliant Cuban Guillermo Rigondeaux. Frampton was ordered to defend his super bantamweight titles against Rigondeaux but took the sensible option: vacating, gaining weight and beating Santa Cruz, who was as daunting a task as Rigondeaux. The Cuban congratulated Frampton and promised to keep chasing him. "He is a true warrior and I know he will fight me," Rigondeaux said.
Right now Frampton needs to let his face stop aching, rest his sore hands and enjoy a Belfast homecoming that perhaps no other active boxer, certainly none of Britain's other 13 world champions, could dream of experiencing. Santa Cruz, meanwhile, will return to California to try and make sense of what happened. At the same time the fight fixers will go to work in their parlours and try and get their boxers a piece of the Frampton action.