Welterweight champions of the mostly-filmed (WWII onwards) era, listed chronologically: let's sort!

Eh...I dunno, man, going to have to respectfully agree to disagree with you on this.

I'll admit that mid-to-late 70's at welter is a bit of a relative blind spot for me, but I'm just not seeing what you're seeing there, even taking a good hard look and keeping an open mind.

My understanding has always been that welterweight experienced what is widely considered a drought of serious talent (of any really transcendent caliber, or with any real depth) in the post-Mantequilla vacuum, when the paths of the WBC & WBA diverged. Even allowing that comparisons with the red-hot era to follow (the arrival of Benítez/Leonard/Durán/Hearns) would be an unfair standard to hold any era up to, I've never seen any professional scribe or dedicated hobbyist make the assertion that 147lb, in the back-half of the disco decade, was in anything other than a "cooling off" period. I don't think you'll find I'm necessarily alone in considering the void of several years after Nápoles' reign (or even beginning with its tail end) to be a kind of nondescript blur of "Palomino & Cuevas at the forefront...and then a bunch of red-shirts behind them".

You probably do know a lot more about the mid-late 70's welter scene than I do, granted (looking at some of your post history, particularly your involvement with Señor Pepe's rather overwrought panegyric history of Cholo, it seems you kind of fetishize the division in that era in general, and Espada in particular...not to cast aspersions, but perhaps that's because you also seem to be a huge Pipino booster? And big-upping the guy he famously upset for the championship - and who subsequently represents two of his eleven successful defenses, and whom some would say is the second or third best if not the best opponent in his entire reign, behind only Tsujimoto & Campanino if anyone - does flatter Pipino, it must be said. Apologies if the cynical insinuation rings false; you very well could earnestly hold the entire host of contenders of that era in high regard as being a strong batch - I'm just very accustomed to dealing with decoy agendas on these forums and can't ever rule out the possibility when a stance is taken which doesn't jive logically on the surface) but I trust my own eyes. There's plenty of footage available of Cholo, and of Clyde Gray (whom I definitely would never call "outstanding", in the sense of being some cross-era h2h force to be reckoned with, even in his prime, which he certainly wasn't by the Cuevas fight, or arguably even Cholo).

Don't bother citing how long guys like Espada or Gray were highly ranked by the WBA, either, as I don't place much stock in that on its own (nor should anybody, without digging a little deeper). What interests me is whether they beat anyone of note (I'd say no, in the full balance), and how they looked (decent enough but ordinary, to my eyes, in the grand scheme when stacked up with the welterweight contenders & champs of all eras).

Bottom line, I've spent a bit of time researching all the names you mentioned (and in turn, some more that you didn't, going tangentially off those listed names and examining who they fought) - in the event that my never having bothered to look too deeply into late 70's welterweight, on the assumption that it was fairly top-loaded with its two champions and otherwise didn't have much going on, might have been misguided and caused me to miss out knowing about some real gems, as you seemed to be suggesting - and have to say that my present mind remains unchanged about the period between Mantequilla's reign and the early 80's surge: you've got Palomino, and then a ways behind him Cuevas, and then a ways behind him the rest of the field. It was a downtime for 147lbs, and while I'm not in the camp that often underrates Pipino and dismisses him as some fluke champ or unskilled glass cannon who never fought anybody worthwhile, I also don't buy fully into the romanticized legend as some do, or think he was in point of fact some unappreciated font of wizardry and technique whose boxing IQ was so high and work so nuanced and subtle that naught but the real hipsters can see it, or think he could with a single clean blow level any man in history at the weight, or that his reign was stocked to gunwales and replete with undiscovered greats, or anything other than "marginally decent" ...and don't for a moment buy the nonsense that Palomino feared or "ducked" Cuevas (or would have lost to him), nor do I buy that Nápoles feared or ducked Espada (or would have lost to him...even in his twilight, even after Monzón, when he was struggling with the likes of Armando Muñiz - whom, yes, I realize Espada had an easier time with not long before Nápoles fought him, but styles make fights)


I won't pretend to have been intimately familiar with all 90 of the MFE welterweight champs when first undertaking this project, but can probably claim with accuracy to have been intimately familiar (as in, have watched multiple complete fights of theirs before) with all but a dozen or so, and that previous ignorance gap does include Cholo Espada, yes - and in the course of researching my evaluative blurbs I tried paying extra attention to all of those where my familiarity was lacking (or downright anemic in some cases) to put forth a hopefully balanced assessment. In hindsight, my reckoning of Cholo as being among the weaker champions, while offensive to scartissue (and perhaps some others; I'm guessing any major Cuevas backer will have their feathers ruffled) doesn't seem all that erroneous to me having now absorbed quite a lot of information about him and given him the benefit of the doubt of viewing multiple hours of him in action in his prime. Sorry, he just doesn't wow me, and I don't see him transcending eras to defeat any elites or near-eliets up and down the welter timeline.

 

I'd welcome any input you guys have (even in the form of disagreements, like scar's!) in arranging these 90 champs into a pecking order. I'm not sure that is something that has ever been attempted on here (or anywhere?).

Top 15 or even top 40 welter rankings have been done, plenty of times, but to specifically home in on actual belt holders (which is to be to, ultimately, for our purposes, the strict exclusion of worthies like Charley Burley who might in many an educated opinion in fact be greater than more than half of the champions listed but never officially handled the hardware, giving us an objectively grounded and finite number of names to play with) and sort them first to last - I'm not sure anyone has ever been crazy or ambitious enough to even suggest it. Hell, even I'm reining up short of suggesting we do a full accounting reaching back into the 19th century (for the reasons given in my OP; some may disagree and find it practical to compare Floyd Mayweather Jr. with Paddy Duffy, but, sorry - my thread, my rules ); that would be just utter madness.

I figure if we go by my few opening posts, we can at least pare it down into generally agreed-upon groupings - ie, there will be 15 or 20 or so names that usually find themselves ranked as the very best; and for the most part (although there will be some bones of contention, as with Espada) the guys I give Horn a chance to beat can probably be said to comprise the bottom-third. So then we just have to put the upper & lower caste in proper order, and then get started on hierarchizing the big jigsaw in the middle, which I think will prove to be the real nitty-gritty, the most laborious part of the process.

 

Whatever happened to Raging B(_)LL, anyway?

Hasn't logged on here in over three years (Dec. 2nd of 2014, to be exact, per my Mod-o-Scope).

 

Are we generally content with, say, this whack taken a couple of years ago by @McGrain at tiering off the welters?

Obviously we'd just need to give it a little trim (all the nearly-men and denizens of various murderer's row incarnations that never officially held the honor - plus all the pre-Armstrong champions, since we're restricting our debate to guys we can all provide informed arguments on based on mutual parity of access to a decent share of footage) and see how it looked from there once pruned, and then backfill everything beneath it down to whoever ends up the bottom man in the inglorious ninetieth spot.

 

Also, while I have utmost respect for RB, we don't have to go solely by his word on this, as Basilio vs. Saxton I can be directly observed for ourselves:

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Nice input, thanks!

I have to say Porter has never been to my tastes but it seems like Horn would be grist to his mill...right there for him to swarm and overwhelm/rough up with greater physicality. You've given me a bit to chew over, going to have to watch Horn and welter Brook side by side, would never have occurred to me to say the former had the better movement..

 

Thank you for the contribution.

 

He's up there (or, er, down there, rather), for sure.

 

...bur did you peak at the same time you piqued? (or peeked )