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

You misread; I never said he'd beat a 2009 Pac.

I defended the win that did occur, in 2017, as being a legit win over a credible welterweight champ (which is what Pac still was).

 

I was going by "championship" form, basically, yeah - but with Pac his time as welterweight champ spans over such a long time you have everything from Mega Pac in '09 to kind of bootleg Pac in '17.

So yes I cherry-picked that latter weaker version to focus on, admittedly, but mostly to prove a point because all that nonsense about Horn a) getting some horrific robbery that belongs on "worst of the millennium" lists, or b) getting fed a corpse of Pac who couldn't fight a lick anymore when the guy was coming off two good wins, all needs to be quashed already.

 

Dude, I've met Tony DeMarco. That's him in my avatar. I love the guy. I own his biography, and might reread it now that I think of it.

Fact is, Horn DWARFS him.

...and this is my rationale for Horn beating a lot of these guys way back on the welter champ timeline. We're in the day-before weigh-in era now. Things are different. Conditioning, nutrition, etc. are different. Horn is a physically bigger and stronger guy than most of these long-ago welter champs ever faced unless they moved up in weight and fought middleweights, that's just a fact. Most guys in history, certainly the rank and file journeymen type guys but also many of the champs (since champs run the gamut from "HOF" to "paper titlists") were not capable of what a SRR or Pacquiao can do, fighting much bigger guys and getting by on skill alone. Usually, "not quite as talented, yet bigger" equates to a victory for the bigger guy. Horn is all-around decent, physically strong and fit, with a so far apparently more than serviceable chin, and naturally a big whoppin' ol' modern-day standards welterweight. That is enough to beat a lot of guys that held titles ~70-80 years ago. They're just too small, even if they happened to be amazingly good, which a lot of them weren't.

 

Well the point of this became about far more than Horn - I actually don't really care that much about the dude. Moderately interesting Cinderella Man story (was such a random pick to get a crack at Pacquiao, seemed like such a pushover even to any of us that had seen him before, and then put up an unexpectedly good fight and even deserved the nod IMO and in the eyes of many others), but that's about it.

It was originally a cheeky exercise in pedantry to shove - whatever that guy's name was - anyway, yeah his nose in the stupidity of his comment that Horn was the weakest champ at the weight, ever. The sheer arrogance of making a statement like that as though we're to believe he ever thoroughly researched every welterweight champ to know whether or not there were a couple of duds or bad apples in there worse than Horn. And then it just turned into this passion-project that was "hey, something kind of silly, this little gotcha moment with this random troll, birthed a legitimately interesting undertaking, something I don't think has been done before..."

Hell, even the work I did on this so far isn't comprehensive in the least - but mostly due to my conscious decision to omit the guys from the BFE. If we include them Horn probably sinks even lower in my reckoning than bottom-third of all the champs, because the guys in the "Before Film Era", up through Armstrong, from what I gather were all very respected in their day. Problem is, without anything to watch, I can't in good conscience make h2h comparisons. It just doesn't work for me, personally.