Yes, so if the madness of the alphabet boys had taken root in the 1930 s and there were at least 5 Belts to pick up! We know Louis bags one or more, who else was good enough back then to win A TITLE.? TWO TON TONY PERHAPS??
Sharkey wins a belt, Baer wins a belt, Schmeling wins a belt, Louis wins a belt, Primo wins a belt, and they never fight each other. That is, until Two Ton unites the belts.
They did. The disagreements just have been largely glossed over. Stribling being NBA champion following the Schmeling v Sharkey controversy is a good example. You had NBA(WBA), IBU, BBBC, NYSAC and ABA. On occasion states other than NY would recognize a different champ then everyone else. There were also title disagreements predating sanctioning bodies. There was a period post WW2 pre 1960s where the sanctioning bodies almost always agreed on their champ though creating this idea it was always like that. I think they had a meeting in 1938 that marked the end of this chaos for the most part. The main difference between the modern alphabelt era and all this is the mandatory and stripping champs for refusing to fight a specific opponent which is the biggest reasons sanctioning organizations have seperate champs. These early disputes tend to have more logical reasons.
Maybe they get a Unification thing going on, like Tyson in the late 80 s. Joe would pick those belts up easy peasy.
I agree great contenders like Schmelling, Sharkey or Conn improve their resumes with some belts. Probably even some pretender manages to briefly snatch a belt here and there. But the cream rises to the top eventually. Louis unifies totally or almost sometime around mid - late 30s
Farr and Schmeling were the alphabelt champs created at the end of Braddocks reign. Louis's fight with Schmeling is the fight where Louis became generally undisputed. JH Lewis and Conns had some 15 round fights at HW(which in 1938 had been agreed to be for title fights only)but this could be attributed to them being the LHW champ. JH Lewis's loss to Braddock was considered an obvious robbery so I guess there was some sort of HW case to be made. Louis himself stopping Max Baer might have made some consider him the real champ given Braddock won his belt via competitive decision and that scenario is the one which caused the most controversy in the early days of boxing. The IBU tried to name a seperate champ in late 1935 but Godfrey retired right after winning. Pierre Charles(who'd lost to Godfrey) was not named the world champ when he won the vacant belt after that but at LHW they recognized their own champ for awhile with WW2 preventing unifcation for obvious reasons. The IBU had previously crowned Uzcudin as champ but this lineage was absorbed into the lineal belt when he lost to Carnera and like the Stribling belt is usually ignored as a result. I also have a suspicion some informally brought back the "white" HW title early in Louis's reign because the top white HW contenders fight was always 15 rounds for a few years at which point non title fights(including regional and minor titles) were almost never made for 15 rounds again. I'm not going to list the fights but I'm pretty sure all those fights involved some combination of Max Baer, Tommy Farr, Lou Nova or Tony Galento. In any case Louis beat them all and that lineage would have ended with Louis beating Lou Nova in 1941 if one were to exist. An alternate less cynical explantion for this is per the IBU world congress in April 1938 "All bodies agree that world championship bouts, qualifications, and semi-finals for world titles must be 15 rounds." And these fights were all considered "semi finals for world titles" Either way after this series of fights which concluded in 1940 non title 15 rounders at HW stopped except for the Conn fights listed above and even 12 rounders became rare(until the 70s and 80s). There seems to have been a 4 man tournament to name Louis's successor in the late 40s that was 15 rounds but thats basically it.
Yes that's right, having those state belts and such as the BBBC, but some how it never really muddled the picture back then, of who the true champ was. For me the crap started in the 70 s, we had a few separate champs then, WBA and WBC. Of course the true rot set in in the 80 s. It's never really recovered from there imo.
Didn´t Lee Savold win the BBBC recognization as Heavyweight champion with his four round drubbing of Bruce Woodcock. Then he was kayoed by a comebacking Joe Louis who then was recognized by the BBBC. In today´s world that would make Louis the first 2 time heavyweight champion, 9 years before Floyd Patterson.
Boxing, like everything else, was more understandable, more logical, simpler... 100 years ago, than now. Max Baer would certainly get his hands on some of the belts in addition to Louis. I'm not so sure about the others. This topic could have had an alternative name "Top 5 HW 30s".
Yes remember reading about that, thinking how crazy that was. Suppose it's par for the course with boxing, mad decision s.
Yes. They slowly had to walk that back because Charles had a win over Louis. In any case that lineage would be absorbed into the main belt when Marciano wins it. Fitzsimmons, Jack Sharkey and Schmeling were some variant of 2x HW champ though 2 times that would be the result of DQ. Fitzsimmons was the first lineal 2x HW champ and the first lineal LHW/HW champ and people pretend neither feat ever happened.
