By Frank Gaskins: There are a lot of things that should or shouldn’t be taken into consideration when these two titans clash on Sept. 14th, depending on how deep you’re willing to dig. However after watching the open workouts of Floyd Mayweather Jr. (44-0, 26 KO’s) and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (42-0-1, 30 KO’s) the past couple days it becomes painfully obvious that STAMINA will be the deciding factor in this fight.
Canelo seems to train at the same pace at which he fights, in spurts. Stamina has always been the question mark with Canelo, “is he able to fight an entire 3 minutes of each round”, “what if he met a fighter that could take advantage of his stamina”?. During the Austin Trout fight he was clearly gassed, at times taking nearly the entire round off; luckily for him Trout didn’t let his hands go (that won’t be the case with Mayweather).
The open workouts for Canelo showed him punching the heavy bag, but I noticed that after a combination or two or a few punches Canelo would step back, bounce around for a couple seconds as if to get his breath back and then go back to throwing a few more punches.
This not only happened during the heavy bag portion of the workout, but also when he was in the ring shadow boxing. He would punch and pause, punch and pause. In contrast, the workouts for Mayweather were as usual a blistering pace of constant motion.
When Floyd was on the heavy bag there were no breaks or pauses and these aren’t light shots he was throwing, he never stepped away from the bag until it was time to switch to another exercise; then it’s straight onto the next thing. On the mitts with Roger Mayweather constant motion, body bad with Nate Jones constant motion.
Floyd is a throwback fighter, he could easily fight 15 rounds. There will no doubt be moments in this fight where Canelo will tire, when he does Floyd will smell blood and go for the kill. Canelo does have his advantages, youth, strength and size but the deciding factor in this fight is stamina and Floyd has an overwhelming advantage in that category. I just can’t see Floyd losing to a guy that’s not as well conditioned as himself, in that case he may never lose.
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