Arum: Canelo wasn’t ready for Mayweather

By Boxing News - 09/22/2013 - Comments

canelo818By Dan Ambrose: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum thinks former WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvare (42-1-1, 30 KO’s) was thrown in with Floyd Mayweather Jr. (45-0, 26 KO’s) way too early in his career for him to have had a real chance to beat him.

Arum notes that Canelo had only faced one decent opponent in his career in Austin Trout, and for that reason he wasn’t even close to being prepared to compete with a fighter as good as Mayweather Jr.

Arum says he knew it was going to be a mismatch going into the fight, but he didn’t want to tell people his feelings because it would give the impression that he was talking down the fight.

Arum told thaboxingvoice.com “Canelo, other than his fight with Trout – who is an ordinary fighter – had never fought anybody. He [Canelo] just wasn’t ready…he’s not a schooled fighter, and therefore it was clearly going to be a non-competitive fight…Canelo wasn’t nearly ready to fight Mayweather.”

It goes beyond just experience for Canelo. You could have had Canelo fighting the best guys from day 1 in his career, and he still would have been over-matched against Mayweather.

Canelo’s problems are that he lacks hand speed, he’s flat-footed, slow moving, and way too heavy to be fighting a quick welterweight like Mayweather. Those elements wouldn’t go away no matter how much experience Canelo had.

Mayweather was simply a more athletic guy, and you can’t change that simply by having Canelo fight more fights. Mayweather will always be faster and more athletic than Canelo.

The red-haired Canelo could have had 100 fights under his best against the best of the welterweight, junior middleweight and middleweight divisions, and he still would have been over-matched against Floyd.

Canelo needs to be fighting in the correct division for his body type, because having a guy melt down from the 170s to fight at 152 is just asking for problems. It had to have been a huge ordeal for Canelo to take off the weight that he did just to make the 152 lb. catch-weight.

The fact that Canelo weighed only 165 for this fight instead of 172 obviously didn’t help Canelo either. He lost 7 pounds of muscle weight for this fight, and you can’t do that without being weaker for it.



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