Can the lineal champion lose his claim outside the ring? And, if so, when?

I suppose if they wwre chosen there was some supposed reasons.

 

Iirc, Jeffries nominated them as the top 2 x contenders for the title he was vacating and even ref'd their bout.

Personally, I recgonise Hart as THE champion after beating Root. I was just agreeing with Mac that you can't demonstrably, unequivocally say that the lineage changed as a result of the outcome of their fight, by applying the established criteria of #1 vs #2 ranked contenders in the event the lineal champion is retired. You can't demomstrate it didn't, either, because there were no published rankings.

 

It's not beyond anything. It's just a horrible analogy. Apples to oranges.

The lineal championship is a new concept loosely based on the historical precedenses, yes. However, what I'm trying to argue here, the new line of succession never really started on the basis of a number 1 vs number 2 match-up alone.

 

You seem to have gotten yourself into a rut of thinking. For what reason, I do not know. I don't want to cover the use of analogy again, because attacking it in the manner you have is problematic in its own way.

So, that aside – In the statement you made that I initially responded to, there were two distinct errors.

One was a philosophical misconception. The other was a factual mistake, and I have addressed both in the exchanges since.

The philosophical error is believing that 'naming a thing creates the thing named', rather than simply describing what already exists. This error and only this error was covered by the analogy.

The factual error is your claim that the lineal championship is a concept created in the '80s, when both the practice and the philosophy underpinning championship lineage predate that by decades. It stretches back through Fleischer and Ring Magazine and beyond that to the bare-knuckle era itself.

Beyond the two errors above, the wider question that this exchange raises is one that others in the thread have addressed with considerable clarity. The distinction between lineal champion and consensus champion is real and important.

While they can often be the same fighter, this is demonstrably not always the case. The distinction matters to the questions actually being debated here.

The pre-1920 era presents genuine challenges for tracking lineage in the way we can using post-Ring Magazine rankings. Naturally, this deserves honest acknowledgement, and it has been given credit. However, these challenges speak to how precisely lineage can be tracked — not whether lineage existed before or after a certain point in history.

That is an entirely different question from the one your original statement was making.

The more relevant and genuinely contested question — whether a lineal champion can lose his claim outside the ring, and if so, when — deserves to be debated on its own terms, not obscured by an error that was never valid to begin with.

I hope this clears things up.