NWA World Welterweight Championship Campionato Mundial Peso Welter de NWA
The current champion Mephisto
Details
Current champion(s)	Mephisto
Date won	02007-11-27 November 27, 2007
Promotion	Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre
Date established	01946-03-15 March 15, 1946
Other name(s)	World Welterweight Championship (Creation—1952)
Statistics Most reigns Karloff Lagarde (3 reigns) First champion(s) El Santo Longest reign Karloff Lagarde (2,742 days) Shortest reign Shinjiro Otani, Último Dragón, & The Great Sasuke 1 day)

The NWA World Welterweight Championship (Campeonato Mundial Welter de NWA in Spanish) is a professional wrestling championship governed by Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre (CMLL). The title has also been used by New Japan Pro Wrestling, and was part of its J-Crown Championship. After the J-Crown was discontinued the title remained in Japan being promoted by the Toryumon promotion up until 2007 where it returned to Mexico and CMLL. As with the NWA World Light Heavyweight Championship and NWA World Middleweight Championship, it is not currently recognized by the National Wrestling Alliance, having ceased to ackowledge it when CMLL withdrew from the NWA in the late-1980s. Being a professional wrestling championship, it is not won legitimately; it is instead won via a scripted ending to a match or awarded to a wrestler because of a storyline. The official definition of the Welterweight weight class in Mexico is between 70 kg (150 lb) and 78 kg (170 lb), but is not always strictly enforced.^{[Note 1][1]}

The championship predates the creation of the National Wrestling Alliance in 1948 and was initually just known as the "World Welterweight Championship", promoted by Empressa Mexicana de Lucha Libre (EMLL). When EMLL joined the National Wrestling Alliance in 1952, the title was given the prefix "NWA".^[2] In the late 1980s EMLL withdrew from the NWA, they changed their name to Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre (CMLL) to create a clean break from their past NWA association. CMLL retained three NWA labeled titles, the Welterweight championship, the NWA World Middleweight Championship and the NWA World Light Heavyweight Championship, despite none of them being officially recognized by the NWA.

In 1992 the then-champion Misterioso left CMLL to join the newly formed Asistencia Asesoría y Administración, vacating the championship. CMLL had recently created their own Welterweight Title and thus decided not to use the NWA championship for the time being. It would be three years before the NWA Welterweight title was used again, when Negro Casas won the title. A few months later Casas lost the title to Shinjiro Ohtani in the first round of the J-Crown Unification tournament. The title would switch hands in each round of the tournament as Último Dragón won it the next night and then The Great Sasuke, who won the tournament. In 1996 and 1997 the title was defended as part of the J-Crown, until the J-Crown was broken up into the original individual titles and vacated by the end of 1997. Just over a year later the championship resurfaced in Toryumon where Dragon Kid won it. For the next several years the title became the exclusive property of Toryumon, being defended mainly in Japan and occasionally in Torymon's Mexican branch. It was not until November 27, 2007 that the title returned to its country of origin as La Sombra won the title from Hajime Ohara and brought it back to CMLL.

El Santo became the first Welterweight Champion on March 15, 1946 by winning an eight man tournament. Averno is the current NWA World Welterweight champion having defeated La Sombra for the title on May 27, 2009 This is Averno's first run with the title; he is the 56th overall champion and the 43rd person to hold the Championship. Karloff Lagarde holds the record for both the most title reigns, with three, and the longest individual title reign, 2,742 days. Three men have held the title for just one day, Shinjiro Otani, Último Dragón and The Great Sasuke.

[edit] Title history

Key

[edit] Reigns by combined length

Key

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• "National Wrestling Alliance World Welterweight Title". wrestling-titles.com. http://www.wrestling-titles.com/nwa/world/nwa-wl.html. Retrieved March 6, 2009.