Undisputed champion recognised a different champion. The disputes were usually short-lived as a lucrative fight would be organised between the rival champions. The longest split was ten years, of the middleweight title, between Mickey Walker's move up to heavyweight in 1931 and NBA champion Tony Zale's defeat of NYSAC contender Georgie Abrams in 1941. An early use of "undisputed" appears in a "New York Times" preview of the 1941 fight. The growing popularity of boxing outside of the USA led to creation of various boxing organizations, each strengthening their influence (most notably BBBofC) and having their own champion. This resulted in a
Undisputed champion World Boxing Foundation are disregarded. If a fighter wins all the titles but is stripped by one organization of its title, he may continue to be considered the undisputed champion. Roy Jones Jr. was spuriously promoted as the undisputed light heavyweight champion by HBO after unifying the WBA, WBC and IBF titles in June 1999, for which he was also awarded The Ring championship title in 2002. However, two of those belts (WBA and IBF) had been stripped from Dariusz Michalczewski, who had unified them with his WBO title by beating the Lineal champion Virgil Hill in June 1997, and