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you don't always need to beat the man to be the lineal champ. a boxer could fight tomatocans and not fight any legitimate contender and still be the lineal champ or you could be on a losing streak at another weight division a still be the lineal champ.
lots of times the best boxer in the division is not the lineal champComment
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Good move by Bradley. He should drop the WBO belt while he's at it.Comment
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but now when Amir gets passed Maidana and beats the Alexander-Bradley winner he still won't be the unified champ. AHHHH !!Comment
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After Bradley wins he'll effectively be WBO, WBC and IBF champion because it's not like Alexander lost his IBF title in the ring.
But Bradley won't be officially recognised as lineal champion because Alexander is rated number 3 JWW by the ring (Bradley is ranked number 1) - he needs to beat the number 2 rated fighter, which is Amir Khan.
After Khan beats Maidana and Bradley beats Alexander, it'll pave the way for a unification bout between Khan and Bradley for the WBO, WBA and The Ring titles. The winner would become unified, lineal Junior Welterweight championand would definitely make it into the top 7 or 8 pound for pound fighters in the world. He just won't hold the WBC and IBF titles.
I think Khan will win and become lineal champion. He can then;
- rematch Bradley (unlikely),
- take on Alexander, who would probably already have won back the vacant WBC title,
- fight the IBF champion, which will be Mabuza or Judah.
- move up to Welterweight for one fight to test out what it's like fighting at 147, and after that either move back down to 140lbs.
- pursue a fight with Mayweather at 147
- move up to Welterweight permanently and whoop Berto's ass.Last edited by £-4-£; 11-09-2010, 04:46 AM.Comment
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if Bradley wins, does Alexander lose the WBC belt and it becomes vacant, or does he hold onto it?Comment
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As I've already said, no system devised by humans will ever be perfect. But the lineal champion is the world champion.
If you change weight division you are no longer the lineal champ in your old division, so you're wrong about that bit.
And to become the lineal champion, you do always need to beat the previous champion, except when the title is vacant, in which case, the #1 and #2 (or in exceptional circumstances the #1 and #3) have to square off before there can be a new champion. So you're wrong about that too.
It's extremely rare for the lineal champ to get away with not fighting top contenders for very long, because the public usually demand it. Money talks. And once they do fight top contenders, they always get found out, if they're not the best (as happened to Boldomir, Michael Spinks, Briggs, etc).
When The Ring bravely and correctly insisted on continuing to recognise Michael Spinks as the lineal Heavyweight champ, at a time when everyone else was saying Tyson was the champ because he held the alphabet belts, the result of The Ring's stance was that interest in the fight built up to the point where it became too lucrative for either fighter to turn down. As a result, Tyson beat the man who beat the man, and we had divisional clarity. If The Ring hadn't taken that stance, that fight might never have happened, and boxing would have been the loser.
One bad exception was the Michalczewski/Gonzalez/Erdei situation, but the problem there was that The Ring didn't recognise Michalczewski as they should have. As a result, there was no public demand for Jones to fight him, and therefore we didn't have divisional clarity, and ultimately it harmed Roy's legacy. It also harmed the division for a long time (only finally being resolved when Pascal beat Chad).
It's true that back in the day, when there were no mandatories, some top contenders were frozen out of the title picture, so that Archie Moore didn't get his first title shot until he was 39, despite having been a top contender since he was in his early 20s; and arguably the greatest Light Heavyweight of all time, Charles, never got a title shot at all, until he moved up to Heavyweight. But that doesn't mean that the likes of Joey Maxim were not world champions. They were. The world champion is not always the best, but the lineal champion is always the world champion. And most of the time, the lineal champion is the best, whereas most of the time, that is not true of most alphabet titlists.
To repeat myself again, all human systems are flawed, but the fact that it's flawed is not an argument that the lineal champ isn't the world champion. He is. He isn't always the best, but he is always the world champion. And most of the time, he's the best.
Boldomir was not a good world champion, but he was the world champion, and it was only when Floyd beat Boldomir that he became the world Welterweight champion. And Boldi wasn't champion for long, so the fact he was a very weak one didn't matter.Last edited by Dave Rado; 11-09-2010, 06:02 AM.Comment
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Hopefully Bradley vacates the WBO belt if he beats Alexander and then Khan for the Ring belt.Comment
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