Magic Johnson: Mayweather was so good against Canelo the fight was boring

By Boxing News - 09/17/2013 - Comments

By Dan Ambrose: Former NBA star Earvin “Magic” Johnson thinks last Saturday’s fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez was such a one-sided fight that it ended up being a boring bout for him to watch. Mayweather won the fight by a 12 round majority decision after one of the judges came up with a strange 114-114 score. However, Canelo really only fought well enough to win the 12th round. The remainder of the rounds were one-sided enough to give them all to Mayweather.

Magic Johnson said:

Hopefully this is a good learning tool for Canelo to understand where his talent is in comparison to the class of the boxing world. Canelo didn’t look good at all in the fight, and the only thing that he had going for him last Saturday night was his weight advantage of 15 pounds. Other than being bigger than Mayweather, Canelo didn’t have any positives to offer in the fight.

It turned out to be boring because Canelo was too flat-footed, slow moving and limited to do more than plod after Mayweather for 12 rounds looking for him to stop long enough to land a big home run shot. There was nothing smart with the way that Canelo fought. Instead of trying to throw flurries, Canelo found himself trying to beat Mayweather in a pot shot contest that he had no hope of winning due to his slow hands and flat-footed style.

It’s pretty disappointing that this was the blueprint that Oscar De La Hoya pulled out of his vault and handed to Canelo to beat Mayweather. We did see Canelo throwing jabs like Oscar was talking about, and those were the shots that Canelo had the most success with in this fight. But there was nothing beyond the jabs that Canelo cou’d land on a frequent enough basis to compete in this fight. Canelo was too slow to land his big shots, and once that part of his game was taken away from him, then he stood no chance of winning.

Canelo might still be able to carve a future out beating the less than popular junior middleweights like Carlos Molina and any welterweights that he can lure into fighting him at 154, but Canelo is going to run into problems once he moves up to the middleweight division and has to start facing better quality fighters around the same size as him.



Comments are closed.