By Sean Jones: Canelo Alvarez is stubborn and unyielding about the rematch with Dmitry Bivol needing to take place at 175 instead of at 168 for all his four belts.
WBA light heavyweight champion Bivol (21-0, 11 KOs) feels it’s not considered a challenge for him to rematch Canelo (58-2-2, 39 KOs) at 175 because he effortlessly beat him last May in Las Vegas, winning 10 or 11 of the 12 rounds in his mind.
Some boxing fans believe that Canelo wants to hold onto his precious 168-lb titles because if Bivol trounces him again, he’ll be beltless and be viewed by many as a has-been, which many already sees him as.
“At the same weight, so there aren’t any excuses. At 175 pounds,” said Canelo Alvarez to the media bout fighting Bivol again. “Yes, but everyone will start f***king talking,”
“Everyone is going to f***ing start saying, ‘Oh, but he brought him down. That’s why [Bivol] lost.’ But they didn’t say anything when I went up,” said Canelo.
Canelo was beaten from A to B by Bivol, who pounded the living daylights out of the star and, at one point in round five, had him on the brink of a referee stoppage when he unloaded a seven-punch flurry while he was backed against the ropes.
Canelo looked like he required saving during that flurry, and the referee was watching closely, seemingly about to step in if Bivol had pushed the issue and gone for the kill.
Interestingly, Bivol backed off and let Canelo survive, choosing instead to toy with him for the next seven rounds, in the same way a cat sometimes plays with a mouse before he eats it.
If Bivol had wanted to, he could have finished Canelo because he wasn’t tired from throwing the flurry, and he could have continued to land headshots against the helpless, red-faced Alvarez until the referee was forced to step in and save him.
In hindsight, you wonder whether Bivol was thinking about the potential rematch at the time because if he’d blown the hapless Canelo out of the water like a ‘Destroyer’ warship blasting a smaller vessel on the seas to the bottom, there would be no demand from the boxing world in a second fight.
Bivol feels that a second fight with Canelo would be more of a sporting challenge if he were to have new titles on the line at 168 by fighting the Mexican star for his undisputed super middleweight championship.
This Saturday, Canelo will defend his undisputed super middleweight championship against his WBO mandatory John Ryder (32-5, 18 KOs) on May 6th on DAZN PPV at the Akron Stadium in Guadalajara, Mexico.
