After looking at the alphabet soup, we finally come to the lineal championship and the Ring Magazine championship – the two ways someone can truly claim to be the world champ in boxing. Both championships have the same foundation – the man who beat the man is the man, period. If there is no ‘man’, then a new one is created when the best beats the best.
While the Ring Magazine titlist isn’t necessarily the true champion, a lot of people use is as a proxy for being the true champ. The rules for becoming the champ are rather simple: If you beat the champ, you become the champ, and if there is no champ and If the guy ranked #1 and the guy ranked #2 fight each other, then the winner is the new champ. Occasionally, there are exceptions to this rule, leading to the divergence between the Ring champ and the lineal champ. If agreed by the editorial board of the magazine, then a fight between #1 and #3 can create a new championship. This is usually reserved for special circumstances, such as if #1 already recently beat #2, or if there’s a good reason why #1 and #2 will never fight (such as the Klitschko brothers). Also, when Ring ceased publication for a while, it did not pick back up its old champions when it restarted publication, which led to some divergence in the Light Heavyweight and Flyweight divisions.
So the champ comes down to the rankings themselves. Contrary to somewhat popular belief, Golden Boy, owner of the Magazine, does not control the rankings, and Oscar de la Hoya does not manipulate the rankings for his own benefit. Instead, the rankings are compiled by the magazine’s four man editorial board, with significant input from 37 panelists who submit their own rankings. The panelists include a number of prominent boxing writers and commentators, such as Joe Tessitore, Barry McGuigan, Nick Charles and Doug Fischer, While this isn’t a perfect system, it does tend to get a more balanced viewpoint than rankings compiled by only a few people, as they are compiled by most of the ABCs. The biggest knocks are that the panel does tend to be very Anglocentric, with all but a few panelists hailing from the United States or England, and that the editorial board still has room to move guys up or down in its discretion.
What actually constitutes the lineal championship is a source of constant debate. When there was one sanctioning body, it was easy – the champ of that body was THE champ. Even when there were two bodies, for the most part, when one person held both belts, he became the champ. With four major belts run by money grubbing organizations who like to strip titlists in order to maximize revvenue,
