The best ‘natural’ champion at each weight

No this is not a PED thread, nor about fighters who colored their hair.

I’m talking about those rare breeds who made their names and spent most of their career in one weight class. Doesn’t mean they didn’t start smaller and grow into it, but that this is where they settled and stayed.

Heavyweight is probably the easiest, it only excludes some cruisers/light heavyweights. After that, it gets trickier.

Because … there are stipulations!

To qualify for this, a fighter must have:

1) Held a widely recognized world title in that weight class (so no Ezzard Charles at light heavy)

2) NOT have ever won a recognized world title in any other weight class (so goodbye Roberto Duran, Ray Robinson, etc)

3) This is harder to define, but I’d think the fighter needs to have fought at least 66.6% of their career at or around this weight class — so yeah, a middleweight could have a few fights at 161 or 162 and those count at middle, but 165 … that’s a fight out of class; same thing i f they spent half their career at welter and then found success when they moved up.

Now we’re narrowing it down to the true naturals in a weight class. That’s what they were for most of their careers, and they also didn’t climb up to claim titles in other divisions.

This will, of course, likely reignite the old Hagler vs Monzon debate, but it also takes a lot of usual suspects out of consideration and leaves us with men of more singular achievement who were dominant in their respective divisions.

It’s a think piece for sure to really go through this exercise, so I’m interested to see who puts their mind to it and comes up with some interesting and worthy claimants.

 

I may have to backtrack if I get to doing research and find better guys who spent most of their time in one division or that some of these had more bouts outside of their division, but off the top of my head I’ll go with:

Heavyweight: Muhammad Ali
Light heavyweight: Bob Foster
Middleweight: Carlos Monzon
Welterweight: Kid Gavilan
Junior welterweight: Aaron Pryor
Lightweight: Benny Leonard

I’m probably off on some of those but it’s a start.

 

Thanks pal.

One thing: Saddler held a title of some sort at130. It was kind of a new, ******* division at the time, but I’d have to say he counts as a two-division champ. (As much as I like Saddler — my favorite feather and one of my favorite fighters of all time — so this pains me to point out.)

 

I think both Monzon and Hagler fit the ‘natural’ middleweight criteria — probably more than Jake, actually, as he fought in the mid-160s pretty often and ventured further north.

So I’d have to do some counting on whether I think Jake qualifies, but the idea here is the best in each weight class who was pretty much exclusive to that weight and I don’t know of anyone who rates him above Hagler or Carlos … perhaps by this if he doesn’t have two many fights out of class he’d be next or in the mix for next, but not above those two imo.

 

Some of the in-between divisions are hard because they’re largely either guys moving up from another class or they move on to another class.

Tszyu certainly fits but Pryor tops him for me — I know the narrative was that he was a lightweight who moved up to 140 because he couldn’t get a title shot, but that’s not borne out by the record: he only had a couple of fights with known weights where he was at or very near 135, and apart from that he didn’t have the qualifications to get a title fight at 135 because he never really beat anyone of note at lightweight … or at least no lightweight of note (I wanna say he fought Peppermint Frazier at or around 135, but he wasn’t exactly a lightweight of note).

 

I often see Saldivar and Salvador (Sanchez) as a bit of a coin flip. I’d lean Chava but respect anyone who disagrees on that account — his tragically shortened career makes it certainly fair to go the other way.

Cheers.