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Out of frustration with boxing’s sanctioning bodies, which create multiple titleholders and often wrongfully strip champions for failing to fight an unworthy mandatory challenger, many boxing enthusiasts have taken to creating “lineal” championship pedigrees, identifying the “real” champion as “the man who beat the man who beat the man.” While it is gratifying to see a single champion in each division at every point in time, a strictly lineal championship is often at odds with reality and resembles arcane genealogy more than a method of identifying a boxing champion.
There are times when a fighter may be legitimately stripped of his title without waiting for him to officially retire. After all, a fighter could refuse to face any quality competition, prolonging his purported championship by fighting strictly mediocre opponents. If, during this malaise, another fighter should defeat the other top contenders, he may come to be recognized as the real champion, much in the same way as occurs when there is a vacancy in the title. Obviously, this requires some sort of subjective judgment, rather than the mechanical rules of lineal genealogy.
By recognizing that the lineal champion is not always the real champion, we recognize that the champion requires public acclaim. Similarly, to become a king, it is not enough to be the lawful heir, but one must be recognized by the nation as its ruler, otherwise one is a king in name only. The championship, of course, is not strictly a popularity contest, but it should be based on real achievements in the ring that demonstrate to most informed observers that a certain man is the best in his class.
When a champion is willing to take on all comers, the championship will be passed on linearly, except in case of retirement or changing weight class. When the title is abandoned, a new lineage is established by a fight between the top two fighters, or at least between the first and third best fighters. Obviously, re-establishing a lineage involves the subjectivity of determining who are legitimate top contenders, and even lineal championship lists cannot avoid this ambiguity.
If a champion is not willing to fight all comers, he is not truly a world champion. For example, if he were only willing to fight Canadians, he cannot be more than a Canadian champion. To claim a world title, one must be willing to receive challenges from anywhere in the world. In practice, of course, one can only make several defenses, so the champion is allowed some reasonable discretion in his choice of opponent.
If a lineal champion is not recognized by sanctioning bodies nor by the boxing public, he should not be recognized as a real champion. His anonymity as a a champion prevents top contenders from seeking him out as an opponent. Instead they will pursue bouts with recognized titlists or top contenders, in the hopes of securing a recognized championship. In order to be the champion, people must know you are the champion.
Let us see how these principles might be applied to the heavyweight lineage. First, when a champion retires, the championship may be successfully determined by a bout between top contenders. After Jim Jeffries’ retirement, the former champion chose Marvin Hart and Jack Root as the top two contenders, so the winner Hart was recognized as the legitimate champion. He was beaten by Tommy Burns, a true champion who would fight any opponent regardless of race or nationality.
After Gene Tunney retired, an officially sanctioned championship between Max Schmeling, the top European heavyweight, and Jack Sharkey, the top American, determined the championship. A sanctioning body assumed the role formerly left to the former champion of establishing a lineage.
When Joe Louis retired on March 1, 1949, Ezzard Charles and Jersey Joe Walcott were clearly the best heavyweights, the latter having nearly beaten Louis. When Charles beat Walcott, he was clearly the champion. It would be revisionist history, therefore, to make Louis the champion even after he retired, denying Charles the title until he beat an aged Louis returning from retirement. Had Louis never come out of retirement, no one would deny that Charles was the champion by virtue of beating Walcott, as no superior opponent was available. Louis had willingly abdicated his title and ceased to prove himself in the ring. The burden of proof was on Louis to show that he could come back and beat the proven champion Charles. Although popular sentiment caused many to regard the returning Louis as champion, this contradicted the reality of his voluntary abdication. This good feeling did not restore Louis as champion, since he did not prove his championship caliber in the ring. Public acclaim without corresponding accomplishment in the ring is not enough to restore a retired champion.
Rocky Marciano’s retirement was followed by an unambiguous lineage established by Floyd Patterson’s defeat of Archie Moore.
Muhammad Ali was stripped of his title for reasons utterly unrelated to boxing, so a compelling case can be made to continue to recognize Ali as champion, since he was willing to fight but forbidden to do so. Alternatively, one might declare the title vacant, since the top heavyweight was prohibited from fighting. Ali formally relinquished the title on February 1, 1970, in order to grant legitimacy to the world championship bout between Joe Frazier and Jimmy Ellis. Thus Frazier was truly champion even before he defeated Ali, since he would have been regarded as such had Ali never made a comeback. The situation, in this regard, is similar to that of the return of Joe Louis. Ali could not regain his abandoned title by virtue of public opinion without a victory in the ring against the established champion.
After Ali’s retirement on September 6, 1979, there were two “world” sanctioning bodies, the WBA and the WBC, and two “world” heavyweight champions. Larry Holmes was the WBC champion by virtue of defeating Ken Norton, who received the title that was stripped from Leon Spinks in 1978 for fighting Ali instead of Norton. Considering the controversy of the first Ali-Spinks decision, Spinks was well within reason to grant Ali a rematch, so the WBC was wrong to strip him. Ali regained his WBA title from Spinks, and remained the true champion until his retirement. Holmes’ credibility as a champion was based on victories over Norton, Mike Weaver, and Earnie Shavers, only the last of which occurred after Ali retired. Ali’s abandoned WBA title was won by John Tate over Gerry Coetzee. Thus there were two conflicting lineages, with the more venerable title held by Tate, who was in fact a lesser fighter than Holmes. Yet Holmes was denied an opportunity to prove his superiority over the WBA titlists in the ring, and did not fight an unambiguous top contender until Ali returned from retirement in October 1980. After this victory, Holmes was universally recognized as the true champion.
When Michael Spinks refused to fight the eminently capable Tony Tucker, he opened the road to forfeiture of the title. If ducking Tucker was not sufficient grounds for stripping Spinks, the accomplishments of Mike Tyson in convincingly winning the championships of all three sanctioning bodies made him the undisputed champion. It is unrealistic to insist that Spinks continued to be the true champion after Tyson had won universal public acclaim and offical recognition as champion by defeating Tucker. No knowledgeable boxing fan seriously believed Spinks could defeat Tyson, who was considered invincible at the time. Had the Tyson-Spinks “Superfight” never occurred, Tyson would have been recognized as the undisputed champion by virtue of unifying the titles. Thus it is revisionist to make Spinks the champion until his defeat by Tyson in 1988. Spinks’ first-round knockout loss to Tyson reinforces the likelihood that Spinks would have been an incapable opponent even against Tucker. Thus the Tyson-Tucker fight was a fight between the top two heavyweights in addition to being a title unification bout, and Tyson emerged as the true and undisputed champion.
When champion George Foreman fought Axel Schulz in 1995, he was awarded a decision victory in a bout that virtually all observers felt he lost. Aficionados of lineal boxing genealogies are quick to discard corrupt or inept decisions of sanctioning bodies to strip titlists, but they uncritically accept equally corrupt or inept judging decisions. George Foreman did not deserve to retain the title after denying a rematch to a man who had clearly beaten him, and so he was rightfully stripped and left with no recognized titles. Foreman continued to fight mediocre opposition, and finally “lost” to Shannon Briggs in 1997 in an equally outrageous decision. Thus the lineal boxing historians absurdly insist that Shannon Briggs, by virtue of two horrendous judging fiascos, was the real champion at a time that Evander Holyfield was beating Mike Tyson and Michael Moorer. Foreman had lost every round against Moorer before landing a one-punch knockout for the title in 1994. He was not officially defeated for the next three years only because he avoided the likes of Holyfield, Lewis, Tyson, Moorer, and even Schulz. It is absurd to insist that Foreman was champion for these three years, when no top contender even recognized his “lineal” title, choosing instead to fight real competition for publicly recognized titles. You cannot be the champion if no one knows you are the champion. No boxing expert considered Foreman in the class of Lewis and Holyfield after the Schulz debacle, and Foreman did nothing to prove otherwise in the ring since then. Thus the title was effectively vacant until some unification took place.
Mike Tyson’s attempt to unify the titles was derailed by his two losses to Evander Holyfield, who was suddenly restored as a legitimate titlist. Holyfield’s unification bout with Moorer solidified his claim to the heavyweight title, which was more generally recognized than that of Lewis. Thus Holyfield may be considered the heavyweight champion until his first bout with Lennox Lewis, which was officially a draw but really a clear loss. I am not one to override judging decisions unless they are universally regarded as bogus, so that to uphold them would be to deny reality.
Lennox Lewis’ last bout against Vitali Klitschko was surprisingly competitive until Klitschko was stopped by a deep cut. Despite clamors for a rematch, Lewis did not defend his title again, and he waited a year before announcing his retirement. Klitschko’s performance against Lewis, and the latter’s reluctance to grant a rematch, proved the Ukrainian’s legitimacy as the top contender. His brother Wladimir had also been considered a serious contender until his loss to Corrie Sanders for the WBO crown. The powerful Sanders could then join the top three along with Klitschko and Chris Byrd. Thus Vitali Klitschko’s bout with Corrie Sanders for Lewis’ abandoned WBC title may be considered the true heavyweight championship, and was regarded as such by Ring Magazine, whose recognized champions have once again acquired relevance in the public view.
We can further apply our principles to recent developments in the light heavyweight division. Virgil Hill became the unified champion by defeating the German champion Henry Maske in 1996. Hill was dethroned by Poland’s Dariusz Michalczewski in 1997. Michalczewski was wrongfully stripped of all but his WBO title shortly after defeating Hill. Meanwhile, Roy Jones, Jr. convincingly defeated top-flight competition to win all three major titles. Both Jones and Michalczewski are to blame for failing to make a bout between them occur. Insisting that Michalczewski’s “lineal” claim makes him the true champion defies reality, as does the notion that Roy Jones, Jr. was never champion, despite holding as many as six titles and being considered one of the pound-for-pound all-time greats. Based on his skill level and accomplishments demonstrated in the ring, often against top opponents who fought Michalczewski more successfully, Jones demonstrated his superiority as best he could without actually fighting Dariusz. Jones was universally recognized as the undisputed champion, not only in his home country but in most of the world, not only on the basis of media coverage, but on the basis of his demonstrated skill level and accomplishments. His final unification bout with Reggie Johnson in 1999 solidified his claim, and put the burden on Dariusz to seek out a fight with Roy Jones rather than the other way around. This was the same year that Ring Magazine recognized Jones as their champion.
After Glengoffe Johnson defeated Antonio Tarver for the undisputed light heavyweight championship of the world in a split decision, the sanctioning bodies stripped Johnson for granting Tarver a deserved rematch. Unlike other stripped champions, Johnson insisted he was the real champion even without a belt, having the backing of a newly legitimized Ring Magazine, so it may now be possible for a champion to retain public acclaim even without the recognition of a major sanctioning body. It remains to be seen how this experiment will continue, but Tarver, having won the rematch, is unquestionably considered the top light heavyweight for now, while the lineal champion enthusiasts must embrace Zsolt Erdei out of mechanical necessity rather than recognition of real championship qualities.
Lineal championship buffs are not the only ones guilty of revisionist history, as is evidenced by how mainstream experts praise Bernard Hopkins’ record as a middleweight champion. Hopkins has defended the IBF version of the title more than twenty consecutive times, claiming to have broken Carlos Monzon’s record, but he has been the undisputed champion only since 2001, when he surprisingly defeated Felix Trinidad. This victory was considered to have legitimized Hopkins’ earlier title claim, so he has been retroactively recognized as the real champion since 1995 when he won the vacant IBF title from Segundo Mercado.
In fact, during the mid-nineties, Hopkins was not generally considered the greatest middleweight. After Roy Jones, Jr. moved up in weight class, the first bout between top contenders was between the Argentine Jorge Fernando Castro and Reggie Johnson. Castro defeated Johnson and made four title defenses before losing to Shinji Takehara in Yokohama, Japan. William Joppy beat Takehara and defended his title against competition comparable to that of Hopkins, if not superior. A car accident derailed Joppy’s career in January 1999, though he came back to win his vacant title. Joppy was soundly defeated by Trinidad in a unification tournament, convincing most experts that Hopkins would be overmatched. Hopkins’ victory was considered a major upset, undermining the view that Hopkins was the dominant middleweight of the late nineties. Most lineal historians view the title as vacant at least since Jones left, but I recognize the championship lineage that runs through Castro and Joppy. While there was no undisputed champion in this period, the WBA champions fought more big names, and thus had at least as strong if not a stronger claim than Hopkins. Secondly, the Castro-Johnson fight was a respectable basis for establishing a lineage, while Hopkins-Mercado was not, as Mercado was not a top-three middleweight. The burden was on Hopkins to clearly establish himself as the greater champion, which he did not until the Trinidad fight. Thus I regard Joppy as the champion until January 1999. He vacated the title, but no lineage was established by his comeback fight with Julio Cesar Green, since Green was not a top-three middleweight and Joppy had not proved he was his former self after breaking his neck, so he was not champion by default. The title remained vacant until the Trinidad-Hopkins fight.
© 2005 Daniel J. Castellano. All rights reserved. http://www.arcaneknowledge.org
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