By Dan Ambrose: The 23-year-old former WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (43-1-1, 31 KO’s) wants to create a huge legacy for himself before he retires from the sport in the distant future, and he’d like go down in history as one of the best fighters the sport has seen.
This is why he says he’s agreed to fight WBA junior middleweight champion Erislandy Lara (19-1-2, 12 KOs) in their catch-weight fight at 155 on July 12th at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. Canelo says he chose Lara not because of the pressure that the Cuban Lara was putting on him 24/7 to agree to the fight, but because he wants to be known as the type of fighter who was willing to fight anybody.
“I want recognition. I want to make history,” Canelo said. “When people talk about boxing, I want the name Canelo to always come up. That’s what I want to leave in boxing, and that’s what I’m fighting for. I’ve accomplished so much. I have the opportunity to pick my opponents – the same as [Manny] Pacquiao and [Floyd] Mayweather Jr, but the difference is I choose the most dangerous opponents.”
I’m not sure you can say that Canelo picks the most dangerous opponents, can you? If that were the case, he’d have fought Gennady Golovkin ages ago, because the Kazakhastan fighter has wanted a fight against Canelo for ages now, but hasn’t been given the green light by him for the fight. Canelo is certainly big enough to fight Golovkin, because he actually out-weighs him when he rehydrates for his fights.
Golovkin comes into his fights at exactly 170, whereas Canelo has been fighting from 172-175. If the idea is for Canelo to fight the most dangerous, as he says, then he’s a little behind schedule in fighting the dangerous guys. If he only fights dangerous guys then what was his reasoning for fighting Alfredo Angulo, Matthew Hatton, Kermit Cintron, 42-year-old Shane Mosley, Alfonso Gomez, Josesito Lopez, Jose Miguel Cotto [the 5’5” brother of Miguel Cotto], and Ryan Rhodes.
Fighting Lara is a good start for Canelo, but for him to be really fighting just the dangerous guys, he’s going to need to make a major upgrade of his opposition, because he’s been missing wide of the mark in the guy’s he’s been fighting through much of his career.
His promoter Oscar De La Hoya said about Canelo’s choice to fight Lara, “I didn’t like this fight. It’s not the pressure from the fans or because Lara was taunting him. No, it’s because he wants to fight the best.”
Canelo needs to get his story straight, because he’s already said that he decided on fighting Lara after he taunted him on twitter and came up on stage at the post-fight press conference after his recent win over Angulo last March. So which is it? Is Canelo fighting Lara because he wants to fight the best or because he got upset enough to want to fight him?
If Canelo fights Golovkin in his very next fight after the Lara fight, provided that he wins this fight, then you can definitely agree that Canelo wants to fight only the best. But if he fights Miguel Cotto, who would likely be destroyed by Golovkin in 3-4 rounds, then you’ve got to question this whole ‘I want to fight the best’ angle that Canelo is taking.
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