Canelo Alvarez (62-2-2, 39 KOs) retained his WBA, WBC, and WBO super middleweight titles with a lopsided 12-round unanimous decision win over previously unbeaten Edgar Berlanga (22-1, 17 KOs) on Saturday night. The scores were 117-110, 118-109 and 118-109.
Canelo dropped Berlanga in the third round with a left hook to the head but couldn’t finish him off.
“I am the best fighter in the world,” said Canelo Alvarez after the fight. “He did good. It could be,” said Canelo when asked if he thought the fight would end in the third when he knocked Berlanga down.
Canelo got angry with some of Berlanga’s fouling in the fight, using his head, throwing low blows, rabbit punches, and shots to the back.
Undercard Results
– WBA middleweight champion Erislandy Lara (31-3-3, 19 KOs) scored a ninth-round TKO over former two-division world champion Danny Garcia (37-4, 21 KOs). Lara dropped Garcia with a weak-looking left hand in the final seconds of the ninth.
After the round ended, Garcia’s father chose to stop half the fight. The fans were booing throughout the ninth round due to the lack of action, as neither fighter showed much ambition, especially Danny.
In hindsight, the Premier Boxing Champions made a huge mistake by choosing Danny Garcia, who had never fought at middleweight, as the opponent for Erislandy Lara to defend against after a two-year layoff.
Lara landed only 64 punches in the fight, whereas Garcia landed only 33. What a nightmare this fight was.
“I took him to school,” said Lara. “I didn’t throw many punches, but the punches I landed were hurting him. The punch that I landed to end the fight was a big shot.”
“I came off a two-year layoff. I stepped up a weight trying to be great,” said Danny Garcia. “It’s no excuse. I guess I couldn’t catch my rhythm. I didn’t want to overstep. I tried to be great. I tried. I have to think about it. I did have a long career. It wasn’t my night. He was the better man. I’m sorry, everybody. I tried.”
PBC should have known better than to use Danny Garcia as the challenger for Erislandy Lara for tonight’s co-feature bout. Danny washed in his last fight two years ago against Jose Benavidez Jr. in 2022.
– Former IBF super middleweight champion Caleb Plant (23-2, 14 KOs) overcame an early knockdown in the fourth round to come back to stop previously unbeaten fringe contender Trevor McCumby (28-1, 21 KOs) in the ninth round to win the WBA interim 168-lb title.
Plant flurried on McCumby in the final ten seconds of the ninth round, resulting in the referee stepping in the half of the fight. There was some controversy due to the punches Plant was throwing to get the knockout after the round ended.
Earlier in the fight, McCumby had hurt Plant with a right hand in the second round and dropped him in the fourth with a body shot. Starting in the fifth, Plant made adjustments and turned the fight into an inside contest, bullying McCumby to the ropes to work him over.
Plant showboated after the fight was stopped in the ninth, pretending to throw a shovel’s worth of dirt over McCumby. It was not an impressive performance that would indicate that Plant is deserving of a second fight with Canelo Alvarez.
That’s the fight Plant wants next. He made $10 million in a loss to Canelo in 2021, and he’d told the media repeatedly during the build-up for his fight with McCumby that he hoped to get a rematch with the Mexican star next.
Ideally, for Plant to get a rematch with Canelo, he should have to beat a true top-level fighter, like Christian Mbilli or Diego Pacheco. #8 WBA McCumby is a fringe contender and not a top-five guy. However, Plant didn’t show the kind of talent tonight that would lead one to believe that he can beat Pacheco, Mbilli, or Osleys Iglesias to earn a rematch with Canelo.
With Canelo, he’s now very selective about the type of opponents he faces. So, he might throw a bone to Plant off this low-level win rather than waiting for him to beat one of the top three guys.
– Light Welterweight Rolando ‘Rolly’ Romero (16-2, 13 KOs) won a dull 10-round unanimous decision over the light-hitting, obscure fringe contender Manuel Jaimes (16-2-1, 11 KOs).
The scores were 99-91, 99-91, and 99-91. The former WBA 140-lb champion Rolly showed off his new Shakur-esque fighting style, retreating whenever attacked and clinching frequently.
Jaimes showed no punching power, and it’s unclear why Rolly was holding and moving as much as he did. The referee let Rolly get away with murder with the holding he was doing because he should have warned and penalized him.
In rounds seven through ten, Rolly grabbed Jaimes each time he got near and turned it into a wrestling match. Rolly’s recent eighth-round knockout loss to Isaac ‘Pitbull’ Cruz took away his self-confidence, causing him to be transformed into the Shakur Stevenson duplicate that we saw tonight and an awful copy he’s turned out to be.
After this performance, Rolly may find it difficult to find top-level fighters interested in fighting him because he moved and clinched too much to be an opponent for one of the big names.
– Former WBC and WBO super bantamweight champion Stephen Fulton (22-1, 8 KOs) had to get off the deck to defeat Carlos Castro (30-3, 14 KOs) by a ten-round split decision. Fulton, 30, was dropped by Castro’s counter right hand in the fifth round. Fulton survived the round by clinching after getting up.
In the eighth, Fulton was hurt again by Castro’s right hand. However, Fulton came back to dominate the ninth and tenth rounds with his volume-punching against a tired-looking 30-year-old Castrol. The scores were 96-93, 95-94 for Fulton, and 95-94 for Castro.
It was not an overly impressive performance by Fulton, who was knocked out in the eighth round by Naoya Inoue last July 25th. That knockout loss may have affected Fulton’s punch resistance because he looked vulnerable in the chin tonight, getting hurt twice by Castro, who isn’t known for his power.
– Welterweight Ricardo Salas (20-2, 15 KOs) pulled off a big upset, knocking out Roiman Villa (26-3, 24 KOs) in the third round of a scheduled ten-round fight. Salas took advantage of Villa’s recklessness in the third by catching him with a big right hand to the head, followed by a left that put him down on the canvas.
Villa was too hurt to beat the count, and referee Mike Ortega halted the contest. The time of the stoppage was at 2:06 of round three.