By Dan Ambrose: Virgil Hunter, the trainer for Amir Khan, isn’t sold on WBC middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez’s so-called punching power. Canelo is facing Hunter’s fighter Amir Khan on May 7 on HBO PPV, and many people believe Canelo is going to knock Khan out when the two of them start exchanging blows at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Canelo has built up a reputation as a puncher by a lot of boxing fans and from people in the media. However, Hunter points out that Canelo has only knocked out one fighter above the 147lb division, and that was a weight-drained and ring rusty James Kirkland in May of 2015. Kirkland hadn’t fought in a year and a half before facing Canelo, and he had to take off 40 pounds in just eight weeks’ time.
Hunter feels that Kirkland had no chance of winning the fight in taking that much weight in such a short period of time. Kirkland also wasn’t helped in that he hadn’t fought in almost two years since 2013 when he was selected by Canelo’s promoters at Golden Boy to face him.
Hunter says the guys that Canelo has been knocking out are smaller fighters like Alfonso Gomez and Josesito Lopez. The exceptions were the weight drained Kirkland and Alfredo Angulo. Hunter trained Angulo for the Canelo fight in March 2014, and he says Angulo was a dead man walking from all the weight he had to take off in order to get down to the catch-weight limit for the fight.
“If I had to be honest in my studies of him [Canelo], he’s only knocked out one junior middleweight and that was James Kirkland,” said Hunter to Fighthype. “Everybody knows that because Kirkland was picked at the right time. He was hyped as dangerous but he really wasn’t. He hadn’t fought in a year and a half. He got eight weeks’ notice to take off 40 pounds. You cannot do that and be effective. Kirkland lost to good management to Canelo’s team. They picked him at the right time. Trust me, if he was in the gym and still fighting, they might not have picked him for that fight. But we have to remember the Japanese guy [Nobuhiro Ishida] knocked Kirkland out in one round, and he couldn’t break an egg and he knocked him out. So the guys he [Canelo] has knocked out are considerably smaller. Josesito Lopez, Alfonso Gomez, but then you have Ricky [Matthew] Hatton going the distance, [Ryan] Rhodes going the distance, [Austin] Trout and everybody else. So who have you seen him wobble since Kirkland and before Kirkland? Nobody,” said Hunter.
Hunter is right. Canelo has not been knocking guys out like they think he had. He couldn’t put his punches together to KO Miguel Cotto despite having a big weight advantage over him last November. Canelo also couldn’t KO the smaller Floyd Mayweather Jr. He couldn’t KO Erislandy Lara. The fighters that Canelo did knock out in the last two years were the weight drained Angulo and Kirkland. Both fighters had to take off a tremendous amount of weigh to make weight for their fights with Canelo, and Angulo fainted the day of the weigh-in, presumably from the weight loss.
“He [Canelo] had [Alfredo] Angulo, a dead man, and I know because I was in his corner. Angulo didn’t listen to me. I told him two months before they gave him the fight that they were going to give him the fight. ‘Come up here and let’s start working.’ He didn’t do it. They gave him seven weeks’ notice. They took a frog and fattened him up for a snake, right? So you had to kill yourself to make weight. It was a fat farm camp. It wasn’t a boxing camp. He had to take the weight [off]. He fainted the morning of the weigh-in. If I wasn’t in the bathroom, he would have busted his head and there wouldn’t have been a fight. He was a dead man and he got hit with every punch in the book and never took a back step. He just kept coming forward,” said Hunter.
I don’t think Canelo is a big puncher. He’s got heavy hands, but he’s not a huge puncher, and he’s unable to put his shots together much of the time for some reason. I think it’s a combination of him being afraid to gas out and also him lacking the hand speed to get the knockouts.
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