Lets assume that making either the lower or higher weight would put them at a disadvantage for whatever reason, who would you say has most benefited from the extra divisions? Norris @ super welterweight? Calzaghe @ super middle? RJJ is an option, although he was dominant at both lower and higher. Who you got?
Norris`s chin wouldn`t have held up at middle and he wouldn`t have been able to make welter, Calzaghe was better at light heavy, Jones made a bigger name for himself at super middle than Calzaghe did but he may have been quicker at middle if he could of continued to be able to make the weight after improving the way he did at super middle and he was slower at light heavy, plus his chin couldn`t take a decent shot against heavier men. So Joe benefitted the least.
Gomez at junior featherweight. Best ever at that weight class. Decent, but nothing special at featherweight...and probably would have died trying to starve himself down to bantamweight.
If my memory is correct, Norris was willing to come to 47 to fight Whitaker and often weighed in a couple pounds less than 54.
I imagine the additional lower weight classes, like 122, would have been a great pit stop for fighters like Ruben Olivares.
Gomez was perfect for the class. When you watched on TV his JrFwt fights, you always knew he was the "bigger guy" in the ring.
Rt. I was looking at the info on Ruben the other nite and thought the same. Ruben was about 4 years too early when he moved up from bantam to Feather as he outgrew the bantamweight division. http://boxrec.com/en/boxer/9040 Super bantamweight, also known as junior featherweight, is a weight class in professional boxing, contested from 118 pounds (54 kg) and up to 122 pounds (55 kg). There were attempts by boxing promoters in the 1920s to establish this weight class, but few sanctioning organizations or state athletic commissions would recognize it. Jack Wolf won recognition as champion when he beat Joe Lynch at Madison Square Garden on September 21, 1922, but afterwards the weight division fell into disuse.[1] The division was revived in the 1970s and the first title fight took place in 1976 when the World Boxing Council recognized Rigoberto Riasco as its champion when he defeated Waruinge Nakayama in eight rounds. The World Boxing Association crowned its first champion in 1977 when Soo Hwan Hong knocked out Hector Carasquilla in three rounds to win the inaugural WBA championship. In 1983 the International Boxing Federation sanctioned the bout between Bobby Berna and Seung-In Suh for its first title. Berna won in the eleventh round
Making 135 would have been a nightmare for Ricky Hatton, but he always struggled at welterweight due to his lack of natural size. In genuine welterweight fights, he was 1-2 with the sole win being controversial against Luis Collazo. With a few notable exceptions, the entire cruiserweight division falls into this category. Someone like Al Cole was too big for 175, but would probably have never progressed past fringe contender status at heavy. Due to the advent of the cruiserweights, he had a lengthy and (relatively) distinguished reign as a world champion. The flipside of this subject is fighters who potentially lost out from there being too many weight divisions which brought down their overall quality of opposition and diluted their legacy. Without a 105 division, Ricardo Lopez may have secured more significant fights against Carbajal and Chiquita, which he would have been favoured to win.
Just for something a little bit different, how about Bob Fitzsimmons. He one the middleweight championship at 150. He immediately raised the limit, so technically every defence of this title he made was an in between weight. Then after losing the heavyweight title, he won the light heavy weight title, which had only recently been created so again, was technically an in between weight class
