Do alphabet titles dilute fighters legacies and punish them in the long run?

Course he's a fair shout, the man was THE middleweight champion, no two ways about it.

 

I would... But there (has, has been mentioned) are others who stop the truly universal recognition thing.

In fact as the sport stands at the moment, I would say it is near impossible that we will ever have a Universal champion again.

 

That's a great opinion.The only time you usually saw people unify back in the day, was due to some huge money being earned.I will always respect Salvador Sanchez, Aaron Pryor, and Larry Holmes, but to some extent, they could have unified.

 

Before I start, I will say that I love the purity of linearity and idealistically this would be the way forward, but it isn't for 2 main reasons:

1) Prestige
2) Lack of enforcement

1) the prestige right now i in picking up a title and unifying. That's the reality we live in today. A boxer gets their promoter to play the sanctioning game, they earn a title shot and they usually seek unification providing equal terms can be secured.

2) a lineal claimant has no requirement to face anyone of any worth (think Foreman 94-97). Whilst the Alpha rankings are paid for, the idea is sound in that a man should face his best challengers.

Pretending that there is only one champ per division is futile as is pretending the belts mean nothing. The reality is the belts are what the fighters seek and there can be upwards of 5 claimants at anyone time. opefully they'll unify claims but more often than not we just have to decide ourselves who the best of the bunch is.

Saying that, context has to be remembered here in that unifying 3 or 4 belts is akin to the 30-60's crowd defending against their top 3-4 contenders.

they don't dilute anything, they just make it harder to compare and evaluate.

 

these fights unless fought against a truly regarded opponent, should only been seen as "just another fight"...

but IF against an accepted top notch opponent, then OK, rated & pointed in the case of a BoxRec type computer scoring system.

but as for Legacy, counted If ONLY against a true opponent!

 

It's the alphabet belts combined with the excess of weight divisions that really devalues things.
I don't think it necessarily dilutes fighters' legacies. It depends on who is rating the legacy. It has tended to destroy the concept of a world title though.
It just gets ridiculous.
Some of the younger fans say things like "____ an ATG ? You must be smoking crack. He's only won four world titles !"

 

That is where my thinking was going. In the case of Tyson, I think that it helped his legacy because he unified all the seperate titles and showed that he was the best at that time.

Without any unification of the titles, it hurts the fighters because no one knows who was really the best because you have so many world champions at the same time.

 

I think alphabet titles dilute the legacies of contenders of the past.
As for the legacies of ABC champions, I'd say on the whole it probably enhances them even on here, the classic, apart from a few people.

 

I was thinking either Pernell Whitaker, or Riddick Bowe.

 

I asses the legacies of contemporary fighters as if alphabet titles do not exist, when I compare them to fighters from the era when there was only one title. That might sound harsh, but it is the only fair way. There is not alphabet belt today worth more than the coloured heavyweight title that Sam Langford and Harry Wills held.

 

As long as the champion defends against multiple top ten level opponents, it matters not if he is an alphabet title holder.