Canelo Alvarez, Ryan Garcia and the Winners and Losers from Boxing's Mega Weekend

Well, that was something, right?

Across three venues on two continents in 72 hours, boxing regained its place at the forefront of the sports world with weekend mega-events that included several of its most recognizable, headline-making fighters.

There was Ryan Garcia in Manhattan on Friday, Canelo Alvarez in the Saudi desert on Saturday and Naoya Inoue at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas on Sunday.

And the B/R combat team was there for all of it to compile a definitive list of winners and losers based on fight results, fan reactions and what it all might mean going forward. Take a look at what we came up with and drop a thought in the app comments.

Losers: Ryan Garcia and Devin Haney

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One guy won. The other guy lost.

But neither did anything resembling upping his public perception.

Garcia, in his first fight back from a failed drug test that scuttled a win over Haney last spring, was dropped early and outworked late in a loss to Rolly Romero that left people openly questioning the clean version of the "KingRy" brand.

"(Friday's) performance by Ryan Garcia goes to show all you mutts at home the difference when a fighter is on steroids and when he's off steroids, or PEDs, and when he's not on PEDs," former two-division champ Paulie Malignaggi said.

As for Haney, his win over Jose Carlos Ramirez was such a dud that even a near-shutout victory wasn't enough to offset criticism that he's either boring, or gun shy after the fight with Garcia, or both.

The Times Square event was designed as a showcase to puff up a planned Garcia-Haney rematch later this year, but, while that fight may still happen, its significance took such a major hit that it'll require a promotional masterpiece to restore.

Loser: Ring Magazine PR

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The idea was marvelous: An open-air fight card in Times Square that'd be at least visually accessible to the constant foot traffic in the "Crossroads of the World."

The reality was something less.

Social media posts began popping up within moments of Friday's opening bell, lamenting the high chain-link fence that separated the general public from the credentialed, invited guests granted access to an unobstructed view of the ring.

It didn't help, either, that the fights were generally unexciting.

And the dud trend continued on Saturday when the Ring Magazine conglomerate jetted across the world to Saudi Arabia for Canelo Alvarez's undisputed bore against William Scull atop a largely forgettable eight-bout card in Riyadh.

The Saturday event was saved, sort of, by the post-Scull announcement that Alvarez would face fellow four-division champ Terence Crawford in September, leaving the broadcast team to discuss something other than three straight weekend fights—Haney-Ramirez, Romero-Garcia, Alvarez-Scull—that approached record-setting levels for inactivity across 12 rounds.

Yawn.

Winner: Jim Lampley

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It had been 2,337 days—or a few months past six years, for those counting that way—since Jim Lampley strode to ringside to do blow-by-blow work.

Just a few minutes into Friday's show, though, it was as if he'd never left.

The now-76-year-old didn't have the best teammates doing analysis, nor were the fights themselves much to talk about, but his mere presence gave the event in Times Square a heft that neither its action nor ambiance would have achieved.

Lampley, an International Boxing Hall of Fame inductee in 2015, had last called fights from ringside at HBO's swan song in 2018 and spent time as an adjunct professor at his University of North Carolina alma mater before returning to the fight game with PPV.com as an analyst in 2023.

He connected with new Ring Magazine owner Turki Al-Sheikh after the Saudi minister tweeted earlier this year that he'd like to have Lampley do a live broadcast.

"I said, 'Wow, you know this is out of the blue.' Didn't expect it. Didn't really know about it," Lampley told Bleacher Report. "Yes, it makes the blood rush a little bit. (I thought) I'll be interested to talk to him and see where it goes and where it went is (I came) back on (Friday) to do blow by blow."

Winners: Rolly Romero, Teofimo Lopez

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One minute you're an afterthought. The next you're a player.

Such was the case for Rolly Romero in the aftermath of his surprise defeat of Ryan Garcia, who'd arrived as a 7-to-1-or-so favorite in some circles.

Romero had played the irrelevant side of the street since a KO loss to Gervonta Davis in 2022, beating the barely recognizable likes of Ismael Barroso and Manuel Jaimes and being knocked loopy by Isaac Cruz in a PBC main event.

Meanwhile, Lopez had racked up a pair of defenses of his second weight class title, at 140 pounds, while veering maddeningly from memorable to forgettable often within the same fight or even the same round.

He was back on the winning and moderately impressive sides in his Friday appearance, stepping out of a yellow cab and into the ring to hand opponent Arnold Barboza Jr. his first defeat after 32 consecutive wins.

Lopez called out welterweight claimant Jaron Ennis with a clever Dora the Explorer reference after his triumph, but it makes just as much sense to get together with Romero, whose defeat of Garcia made him the WBA's second-tier champ at 147.

Winner: Terence Crawford

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Sometimes, proximity is all that matters.

Just by being ringside for Canelo's dreary defeat of Scull, Crawford, a former two-time undisputed champ (at 140 and 147), made himself a big Saturday winner.

First off, he gets full marks for staying awake through 12 rounds in which 111 punches were landed and the 445 punches thrown were the fewest in CompuBox’s 40-year history of ringside counting.

But he made big news by climbing into the ring to go nose to nose with Alvarez, simultaneously erasing the stench of the Scull debacle and starting to countdown to the September 12 showdown at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas.

It's already earned "fight of the century" status from Turki Al-Sheikh and got the seal of competitive approval from Lampley, who called many of "Bud's" fights on HBO and legitimized the match based on the lighter man's outsized determination.

"One of his biggest assets is maniacal competitiveness," Lampley told Bleacher Report. "If we can't tell him he can't do something it triples his desire to do it."

Winner: ESPN's Sunday Finale

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It was the recurring theme of Sunday night's Top Rank broadcast on ESPN.

Remember how bad you felt after the shows on Friday and Saturday? Well, you won't feel that way tonight.

Blow-by-blow men Bernardo Osuna and Joe Tessitore and analyst Tim Bradley pointed out the statistical flops from New York and Riyadh at every opportunity and their card's top end delivered, with a fun featherweight scrap between Rafael Espinoza and Edward Vazquez followed by Naoya Inoue's surprisingly tough defense of his 122-pound supremacy.

Espinoza and Vazquez combined to land nearly twice as many punches through six rounds as Canelo Alvarez and WIlliam Scull did through 12.

The Japanese "Monster" got to 30-0 with a 25th title-fight victory, which came this time with an eighth-round finish of Ramon Cardenas, but only after he'd climbed off the deck from a second-round knockdown.

Bradley couldn't resist a reference to the Manhattan and Saudi shows.

"You see fighters talking on social media. You see fighters running around the ring like chickens with their heads cut off," he said. "But there’s generational talent here tonight. You came to the right place."

Cardenas, who'd arrived as a bigger underdog than Buster Douglas against Mike Tyson, agreed.

"We set the tone," he said. "What we did was legendary and the next fighters are gonna have to show out to top it."