John Thompson (boxer) John Thompson (boxer) John Thompson (born March 5, 1989) is an American junior middleweight professional boxer. Thompson won the 2015 Boxcino tournament - a tournament featured exclusively on ESPN Friday Night Fights. At the finals of this tournament he also won the interim North American Boxing Association and WBO Inter-Continental junior middleweight titles. The Boxcino win increased Thompson's ranking in the WBO. When the WBO title was stripped from Demetrius Andrade, Liam Smith was to fight Michel Soro for the vacant title. Soro pulled out of the fight for the vacant title so Thompson was awarded the title shot by
World Boxing Organization champions Michael Moorer, Riddick Bowe, and Henry Akinwande relinquishing the title to pursue other options. Boxing publication "The Ring" also did not recognize the WBO, despite having recognized the IBF after its inception in 1983, five years prior to the WBO. In the lighter weight divisions, however, long-reigning champions during the 1990s such as Chris Eubank, Dariusz Michalczewski, Johnny Tapia, and Naseem Hamed gave the WBO title increasingly more prestige. The WBO was also made popular by boxers such as Marco Antonio Barrera, Oscar De La Hoya, Nigel Benn, Ronald "Winky" Wright, Joe Calzaghe, and Wladimir Klitschko, all of whom