By Dan Ambrose: Former Floyd Mayweather Jr. victim, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, doesn’t seem to be agreeing with Mayweather’s excuse that he fought Marcos Maidana in the trenches on purpose last Saturday night in order to make it a fun fight for the boxing fans to witness at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. Mayweather says he did it for the fans, but Canelo is under the belief that Mayweather simply couldn’t figure out Maidana’s fighting style until the second half of the fight.
Canelo thought that Maidana was ahead on the scorecards early on in the fight, but when Mayweather solved his style, he ended up falling behind and losing the fight.
“I felt it was very complicated for Floyd in the opening rounds,” Canelo said via the Boxing Channel. “Maidana was doing very well. He was probably winning the fight, but after awhile it looked like Floyd was able to figure him out and do what he does best and he caught a victory. But it was a style that was complicated for Floyd. Floyd complicates a lot of other people’s styles, but this time around it was the other way around and Maidana’s style complicated his.”
It looked like Mayweather intentionally fought Maidana’s fight, because in the rounds he did choose to stay in the center of the ring – rounds 9 and 10 – Maidana was lost, and was getting embarrassed. Mayweather retreated to the ropes in most of the other rounds of the fight, and stayed there. He didn’t fight like that against Canelo or Robert Guerrero, so you have to surmise that Mayweather gave Maidana, a 12-1 underdog, a handicap in order to make the fight more competitive than it otherwise would have been. You have to remember that Mayweather would have taken a great deal of heat from the boxing fans if he had schooled Maidana and won every round. That’s why it makes sense for Mayweather to have fought Maidana’s fight, and stayed on the ropes to give Maidana a handicap. What Mayweather did was the equivalent of a fighter tying one hand behind his back and fighting his opponent with just hand instead of two.
Canelo has a very tough fight on his hands on July 12th against a Mayweather-like opponent in Erislandy Lara at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. If Canelo loses this fight, like many in the boxing world think he will, it’s very likely going to be a huge blow to the red-haired Canelo’s career, and it wouldn’t be surprising if his fights are taken off of Showtime pay-per-view after that and televised on regular Showtime until he can rebuild himself somehow, someway. I’m not sure that Canelo would be able to change people’s perception of him by having Alfredo Angulo type opponents dragged out for him to beat up and look good against. The boxing public will want to see him in against good fighters, but a loss to Lara will be a sign that Canelo might not be good enough to mix it with the really good 154 pound fighters.
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