A brief history of the ABC era (boxing's sanctioning organizations)

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Very interesting, thank you so much for this!! Please rank the major boxing belts in order of most prestigious historically; do you have it as WBC, WBA, IBF, & WBO? Is it the same at heavyweight?

 

Yeah, that pretty much sums up my view of them, if you had to make an ordinal list based on their sum (historical and present) value...with the IBO recently pulling in behind the WBO (shoving neatly past the never-really-a-serious-contender WBF) as maybe a semi-legitimate 5th, yet still a ways to go before even standing equidistant from them as is the IBF on the other side.

 

Thank you for your info. IntentionalButt. There are so many fake world boxing institutions today. Even the major boxing institutions like WBC and WBA have created fake world titles to lure boxers and to confuse boxing fans since the last 2 - 3 decades. The worst of all are the Super Champ and the Regular Champ. of WBA.

 

Fighters are the ones who legitimize the belts.. Larry Holmes gave the IBF immediate credibility when he dropped the WBC belt and decided to only carry the newly created IBF when he was the unquestioned king at HW... So all it would take today is for Canelo or whomever becomes HW king to only carry the IBO and before you know it there’s a big 5(WBC,WBA,IBF,WBO,IBO)..

 

See initially it wasn’t bad and it actually made sense.. They would award a regular champion only when the current belt holder unified or became undisputed.. Then of course seizing the opportunity to collect two sanctioning fees per division was to lucrative to pass..

 

A regular champ or the super champ?

 

I mean, yeah...in theory I agree...but it'd take more of a coordinated effort, with a few different p4p level guys in separate divisions all concurrently scooping up its belt to make a fledgling org magically 'legitimized'. IMO one guy alone couldn't effect that kind of change in perception overnight - probably not even a mega-star like Canelo.

Also people get it twisted sometimes - just because 'the champs make the belt' doesn't mean that in a general sense the belts are worthless. You can have at one given time a piss-weak crop of current WBC titlists, but the green belt is still king because of its CUMULATIVE history and breadth of high-quality tradition over the years.

 

Regular champion.. It was only suppose to be rewarded to relieve a unified champion from unnecessary mandatories after defended it at least once.. If they would have continued to follow their own rules there would only be 6 regular champions..

HW: AJ has the WBA/IBF/WBO
JMW: Rosario has the WBA/IBF
JWW: Taylor has the WBA/IBF
LW: Loma has the WBA/WBC(?)/WBO
JFW: Ahkmadaliev has the WBA/IBF
BW: Inoue has the WBA/IBF

But as I said they saw an opportunity to collect two sanctioning fees so they started handing them out in each division even when there wasn’t a unified champion..

 

Has IBO belonged to those major world boxing organizations now?

 

This thread (and the research in the OP) is absolutely fantastic and vital to Classic in putting things into perspective.

I hereby move that @IntentionalButt be recrowned as @INTERNATIONALbutt

 

No.

 

I think like 60% of people already believe that's what my username says.

 

I thought that for a long time.

Thanks for taking the time to do the research for this thread.

 

IBA Pro - a branch of the organization previously called AIBA (the disgraced former longtime administrators of boxing at the Olympics) - began sanctioning "world titles" in the last few years as well.