I sometimes see people vehemently contesting that the WBO was not a legitimate 'world title' in the 1990's, much like the IBO now. For me, that would make sense, for it was not required to be the undisputed champion. That's the crux of it. But then the same members will refer to Chris Eubank as a world champion. It doesn't make sense to me. I'm not sure if I completely subscribe to the "it's the boxer who makes the belt" line of thought. That's a slippery slope. Eubank held the super middleweight WBO belt, but he also contested the WBO cruiserweight title against Carl Thompson, and I've noticed a lot of people don't consider him to have been a genuine world champion. Would the same people have considered Eubank to have been a genuine world champion had he not lost to Thompson? When Johnny Nelson held the WBO cruiserweight belt, his opposition was quite poor, as were a lot of the heavyweight bouts; rarely contested by the cream of the crop, which is what the consumer really should be able to expect tuning in to a world title bout. Any thoughts? I'm sure some people here can provide more context than I can. It would be good to get some objective opinions. Not just people backing its credibility because they like Eubank etc.
For me it is very simple: you have lineal and you have beltholders. Beltholder is a status of its own probably, but it's not the same as champion. I don't care about undisputed either, except that it usually produces a 1 v 2 so you can start a new stewardship of the true title.
Then who was the lineal champion for super-middleweight? Frank Liles it says online. I put quite a lot of emphasis on lineal if there is a clear lineal champion, too, but I know a lot of people don't seem to share that view for some reason.
Don't quote me on this but i believe Liles won it off Steve Little who had defeated Michael Nunn, Liles is also pretty underrated skillful Southpaw and also tall for the weight at 6'2. And also went on a nice little win streak for awhile. It actually makes me wonder why Eubank, Benn, Collins and maybe even Calzaghe didn't fight him at the time.
Here in the UK he is regarded as a super-middleweight legend, but it looks to me like he never held a legitimate world title at the weight, which is bizarre. As a casual fan I know hardly anything about the guy. In the UK I have never noticed anyone even mention his name.
I have spoken to a few Brits about this and they regarded the WBO more highly than Americans did, in part because a number of their best guys held it. But the fact is that it wasn't viewed as a "world title" stateside and that was the epicenter of boxing power. Plenty of writers in the media were still hungover from accepting the IBF, which was a travesty itself. You can watch De La Hoya's bout with Bredahl or Hearn's match against Kichen to get a feel for how it was viewed here at the time. Both commentary teams dismissed it. Eubank was basically a high-level contender in a layover division who held a glorified European trinket.
The US magazines refused to recognise the WBO title in its early years and often pretended it didn’t exist. As far as I’m concerned, the IBF opened the floodgates to the proliferation of world titles per division and the WBO came into being off the back of that. In terms of Eubank, at the time the WBO title was considered the lesser world title so his title reign didn’t get much legitimacy but in the UK, we were quite happy seeing him as a world champion when he was fighting the likes of Benn and Watson. It didn’t feel like we were missing anything.
Your last assertion is what I tend to lean with as a casual viewer. It’s just the hypocrisy from us Brits that gets me and nobody seems to talk about it.
Sorry to bump this if nobody's interested, I'm keen to get some more opinions especially from Americans who were around at the time.
I think to a lot of us stateside, the B in WBO stood for British for quite some time. It felt like another mostly meaningless title but one embraced particularly in the UK so I’m sure over there those bouts were treated like world championship matches while in the U.S. it was just pretty good fighters facing each other — that doesn’t mean no WBO belt holders were any good nor that none of the challengers were, but the thought was that if they were legit they’d come after one of the ‘real belts.’ And it wasn’t just UK fighters. Nobody seriously considered Michael Moorer or Tommy Morrison to be real world champs when they held WBO straps.
Back in the 1990s the WBO wasn’t a genuine world title belt. It was controlled by Warren and often had ‘champions’ who weren’t even in the universal top 10 as holder. Historical context from others who lived during that era is important. As if you asked someone today it’s clearly very different, because today it is on a par with all the other belts. Of course, there is another step from being one of the belt holders to being the actual recognised universal number 1 of a weight class. Multiple belts have made it a lot harder now to reach that position in each weight division, especially because the best don’t fight the best anymore, and fight so infrequently.
Well it’s largely like it is today. True die hard boxing fans on both sides of the Atlantic knew the score with the WBO it was just another plastic trinket like the IBF which frustrated true fans more than anything more diluting of the sport. Casuals in the UK though embraced it as it coincided with Eubank becoming box office as far as they were concerned he was world champion. In some ways it didn’t matter as the fans got their money’s worth from the fights between Eubank, Benn, Watson and Collins.