When Ben Askren signed with ONE Championship in late 2013, he was widely considered to be one of the most talented welterweight fighters in the world. He quickly did what many observers expected him to do, too, blitzing through back-to-back opponents to capture the ONE welterweight title with ease by mid-2014. But these days, nearly three years after he became ONE’s welterweight king, Askren still has yet to defend his belt in any official capacity, and not for a lack of trying.
A series of bizarre and unforeseen circumstances have left Askren to fight just once a year since he became ONE champion, and even both of those bouts were unusual in some way — Asken’s 2015 fight against Luis Santos infamously ended in a first-round no contest due to an eye poke, then his scheduled 2016 title defense against Nikolay Aleksakhin shifted to a non-title affair once Aleksakhin missed weight.