Seung-Soon Lee: Korean and OPBF Welterweight Champion
Seung-Soon Lee was a South Korean welterweight whose professional career ran from 1979 to 1989. His record included national and OPBF championship success before a WBA world-title opportunity in the United States. Although international accounts often focus on his defeat by Mark Breland, his earlier results document a substantial regional career.
A long winning run in Korea
Lee lost his professional debut to Hyung Duk Choi, then put together twenty-nine consecutive victories. His activity was particularly concentrated early in his career: he boxed nine times during 1980, more than a quarter of his eventual thirty-five appearances. He also won a Korean rookie competition that December.
His later regional achievements included the South Korean welterweight championship and the OPBF title. He defeated Jun Suk Hwang in February 1987 to win the latter belt, but lost it in his first defense the following month. An overseas victory against Sergio Sanchez also formed part of his career before the Breland contest.
The 1989 WBA title fight
On February 4, 1989, Lee faced Mark Breland in Las Vegas for the vacant WBA welterweight championship. Breland, an Olympic gold medalist and previous holder of the belt, won by first-round technical knockout. The bout lasted fifty-four seconds, ending Lee’s attempt to turn regional success into a world championship.
BoxRec’s WBA title-fight chronology identifies the championship as vacant and credits Breland with beginning his second reign. It was a welterweight contest, separate from the super-featherweight and minimumweight championships contested by other Korean fighters with the surname Lee.
Career in perspective
Lee finished with thirty-one wins and four defeats, including twenty-three knockout victories, according to Asian Boxing’s retrospective. His final five appearances contained three of those losses, a sharp change from the lengthy winning sequence that preceded them.
BoxRec identifies his hometown as Seoul and his birthplace as Nonsan. The documented record supports an account of a completed boxing career built around Korean and OPBF honors, followed by a brief world-title challenge. His regional championship activity preceded the 1989 Las Vegas appearance that became his best-known overseas contest.
Sources
Sources: https://www.asianboxing.info/thinking-out-east/archives/12-2021; https://boxrec.com/wiki/index.php/WBA_Welterweight_Title_Fights; https://boxrec.com/wiki/index.php/Seung-Soon_Lee
