Still important. You need them to promote shows. You can get away with not having one if you're the Lineal H/W champion of the world, but not otherwise. Lineage is mostly irrelevant in other weight divisions so you need a belt of some description to establish your championship credentials. Then you need more belts. In boxing these days, whoever finishes with the most belts, wins. If you want to gain entry into the International Boxing Hall of Fame on induction weekend, you have to slip the guys on the gates a belt each to get in. So you need a few & the more the better. The WBC belt looks the nicest b/c it's very shiny. It's also practical to carry around b/c it's light weight. It's very light b/c they make it out of recycled sardine tins. The WBA & IBF belts are much heavier and are suited to cooler climates b/c of their woolly linings. The WBO & IBO belts are a bit bland for my liking, but any port in a storm. I think the WBA have ditched their ridiculous looking WBA Super champion belt. Now all three champs (Super Dooper, Regular & Interim) get given the exact same belt. It won't be long before the WBA starts running it's own unification tournaments to produce an Undisputed WBA champ. Then maybe we'll see a reappearance of the seemingly extinct WBA Super Dooper belt.
Having multiple belts it really is a travesty...if four different guys hold a belt then they are presumed the four best guys in the division...which often is not the case anyway. Then there is different rankings by alphabet orgs, who deserves a title shot, voluntary defences, then there is different promoters, network affiliation...it's all such bull ****. Boxing is like a circus...and there really isn't any solutions to this. Unless boxers unionize or something. Even having one belt would not fix all of this.
What's also become worthless is rating fighters by the number of champs they beat, since all of the champs since the eighties were basically all contenders. Beating a champion now should be downgraded to the level of beating a ranked opponent back in the day. I've also thought that when comparing title reigns of moderns vs old timers the singular title ought to count as four. So one defense in the fifties is equal to four today.
**** using boxrec and ring to figure that **** out. They had Canelo rated number one at middleweight for Golovkin's entire reign.
Boxing is in dire straights at the moment, belts are nothing more than trinkets and hold little value. We all want the best to fight the best and that ain't gonna happen while we got promotional companies like the PBC doing their in house thing and casuals with no boxing sense keep enjoying it. WBC certainly looks pretty but it'd be the first one I'd wipe my arse on.... I don't think boxing will ever come back from this, there will be 10 major org belts by the time my grandkids are fighting. Sad times.
Or the top promoters should come together and create Boxing Association/League... But they are obviously unable to do that. And it’s not even completely clear why, because they could earn even more money united. By using boxers more efficiently (better fights, relatively smaller purses), in the first place. Maybe the notorious Ali act is to blame at least partially.
World Championship Belts today do not mean so much when compared with the past. Big name fighters or Multiple Weight - Classes World Champions like Canelo, Floyd, Pacquiao, and Inoue don't take them seriously anymore. Once I saw Riddick Bowe throwing his WBC Heavyweight Championship Belt into a garbage can when WBC ordered him to defend his World Title with Lennox Lewis.