If The Ring strip Fury will you still consider him lineal champ?

And now he's unretired & the lineal champ.

 

Ali didn't retire. He was stripped by officialdom. Frazier didn't truly become lineal champ until he defeated him.

And determining who the real champ was back in the day wasn't such a hard thing to do given there was only one of them.

The point of the lineal championship is that it's won and lost in the ring. It's not conferred by officialdom or a media/fan popularity contest.

Like it or not, anyone wanting to stake a claim for the lineal championship today needs to go through Fury.

Unless of course they can lure Lennox Lewis out of retirement.

 

No, that won't do. Your history is as wrong as it could possibly be. When Jeffries came out of retirement it was to wash the Hart, Burns, and Johnson reign from the history books. So that record keepers would have down Jeffries from 1899-1908. With no mention of the unforgivable blackness. He failed, that's why they're lineals. Johnson validated Hart and Burns by defeating Jeffries.

Secondly, it happened loads of times. My favorite instance to site is Burke-Ward. Deak Burke was denied his championship status by previous champion Jem Ward coming out of retirement and claiming it five or six times before Deaf'Un finally forced Jem in the ring with him.

Jem would retire and "The Fancy" or matchmakers/backers of the day would establish a championship match for the new champion to be crowned. Deaf won, Jem would announce that the match was not championship material so he'll come out of retirement to be champ a little longer. Jem avoided fighting Burke but did fight and was recognized as champion. So Burke would get to be champion for a few months then Jem would have it wiped from history, where it remains. After fighting a few exhibitions and **** like that Jem would retire and select his choice for the next guy to be champion. Burke would whoop that guy, once killing a poor ******* named Byrne, and Jem would repeat the process until the Fancy had enough of him and forced him to either remain retired, they wouldn't put up a purse for him again, or fight and beat Burke. Jem even got his own kin's ass whooped for them with young Nat Ward suffering a brutal KO at the hands of Burke in Jem's quest to keep the title from the hands of the next champion.

CJS in Bare Knuckle 1722-1895:

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Like I said, that's my favorite, not the only. There's 300 years of history to cover in covering lineal.

So yeah, if Fury fights he is the lineal champion and there's not dick anyone can do or say to change it. Sorry buds, I'd love it if an undisputed came but they're still only lineal as long as Fury stays retired.

 

There's little glory in a reward system no two people can even agree on.

 

Well technically the last champion was Gene Tunney really.

Fury never lost his belts in the ring but he did declare himself retired and unable to defend his belts.

There's always gonna be an argument that he's lineal until he loses, but for me, I don't consider him true champ any more.

 

Yeah but he's only lineal as long as Lewis stays retired.

 

Nice to know what you think and that you believe conjecture outweighs precedence.

 

DONE. The Ring heavyweight championship is now vacant.
https://www.ringtv.com/527524-tyson-fury-stripped-ring-heavyweight-championship-drops-ratings/

 

I don’t class drug cheats as champions.

 

I don't understand why the Ring has had so much issues stripping him? The whole reason he could keep it is due to technicalities and other ways to explain their rules. You can say he already broke 5 of them (while only one is needed), but if you get into lawyer territory, you can find holes in there that technically could be explained as that Fury violated none up until this point. It's quite a funny set of loopholes in Fury's case, as I mentioned before.
It seems to me that they just went out of their way to prevent a lawsuit from team Fury, rather then going by the actual maning of their rules instead.

If you ask me (you probably won't), they should rewrite these rules to close up the glaring holes, so they won't have to wait years and years in coming cases.
The "scedule fight" loophole is ridiculous, as an unwilling to defend big name boxer can never officially retire and just keep sceduling fights and pull out for years citing injuries and such, until their intention to never fight again or wait for that huge payday offer that might never come is clear to all.