How Good Will Canelo Alvarez Be When He Reaches His Peak?
On Saturday night in Las Vegas, it was hard to find a Canelo Alvarez non-believer.
The Mexican defended his middleweight title with the sort of one-punch knockout that people talk about for years, and the way he patiently pursued a faster and more athletic quarry (Amir Khan) en route to the kill shot drew breathless praise from the HBO announce crew that called the fight.
“This was another clinically brilliant performance for Canelo Alvarez,” said blow-by-blow man Jim Lampley. “I don’t how many fighters I’ve seen who are so constantly in control of their emotions.”
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His ringside colleague, former four-division champion Roy Jones Jr., agreed.
“He’s another in a long line of great Mexican fighters,” he said. “Nothing rattles their cage. Their body language never changes.”
Given all the sentiment and all he’s accomplished, it’s easy to forget Alvarez is just 25 years old.
He turned pro as a 139-pound teenager, won his first regional title before he could buy a drink to celebrate and was a world champion for the first time at age 20.
And after Saturday, he’s now had the same number of fights as Floyd Mayweather Jr.
It’s a level of prodigy that neither Mayweather nor Manny Pacquiao—the recently retired stars of the century’s first decade-and-a-half—can match.
But while his youth might lead fans to believe there’s still significant room for improvement, there’s equal reason to surmise that after 11 pro years and 49 pro dates, Canelo is what he is.
The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.
Though it’d be ludicrous to expect Alvarez to morph into a swarming aggressor like Mike Tyson or a defensive wizard like Pernell Whitaker, there are still some tweaks that would serve him well as he comes off Khan and prepares to compete with the legitimate middleweight likes of Gennady Golovkin.
Here are a few.
Sustain the aggression
It’s hard to find real fault with Saturday night’s result. Whenever a fighter has the sort of pop that’ll render his opponent unconscious with a single punch, he’s never prohibitively out of a fight.
Nevertheless, there’s still some reason for concern for a victorious Canelo.
As the early rounds against Khan drifted to the middle, there wasn’t a huge difference in how the three-minute sessions looked. The challenger had faster hands and was moving strategically, and while Alvarez was able to intermittently land with blows to the body and occasionally to the head, it wasn’t as if the knockout had appeared at all imminent at any point.
Similarly to how he looked against Mayweather three years earlier, he instead appeared content to fight at his opponent’s pace with the hope that something would eventually come out of nowhere.
It ultimately did this time, but a truth serum dose to Team Canelo would have surely revealed a good bit of angst as the rounds piled up.
If the shot hadn’t come, who knows?
Use the jab more
Most would agree that while Alvarez is a proud Mexican, he’s not the typical “Mexican” fighter.
Instead, many suggest, the stratum he occupies is somewhere between relentless and sublime.
According to the Boston Herald's Ron Borges, he labels himself as a boxer rather than a puncher, but the strategy he executes toward that end—particularly when his foes are not of the straightforward variety—makes those matchups difficult.
There was a noticeable lack of jabbing against Khan on Saturday, a factor that went a long way toward allowing the Englishman to control the pace.
It was even more noticeable in 2013 against Mayweather, who was able to keep Canelo’s overall output to barely more than 40 punches a round while winning the 36-minute jabbing contest by a 139-44 count.
Canelo is faster than a lot of Mexican fighters, which allows him to use other shots and masks the fundamental void to some extent. But if the match with Golovkin ever does come off, keeping the Kazakhstan slugger busy with a punishing range-finder will make the unification task a trifle easier.
Cut off the ring
Those who remained awake through all 12 rounds of Alvarez’s 2014 track meet with Erislandy Lara will recall the continual trouble he had engaging with the fleet-footed Cuban.
A fighter who’s determined not to engage will be a challenge for anyone, but Canelo spent a significant portion of the fight following Lara’s lead rather than using footwork to limit his routes.
He did a much better job of it against Khan, though the Englishman’s strategy was built far more on hand speed and far less on the sort of movement Lara had relied upon.
If he finds himself in with another would-be sprinter, Alvarez will be best served by space-saving fundamentals like moving laterally, maintaining effective punching space and varying the power of his shots—using light shots to establish distance and then scoring points with damaging hard shots.
The envelope, please
The bottom line, in Alvarez's case, is ironically simple.
Barring a drastic change in corner staff or a declaration that he wants to take a 180 from an approach he's employed since age 15, it'll be quite difficult to teach a mid-20s dog new tricks.
And given the fact that said dog has won two world titles and reached the top 10 of many respected pound-for-pound lists, such full-scale upheaval is really not necessary.
Subtle tweaks like the ones mentioned would provide situational help for stylistically difficult foes like Lara and Khan. Meanwhile, the acumen he's already proven on the way up will be enough to let him compete with most of the others he's likely to come across as his career evolves through its peak years.
Will he ever be the world's best fighter? No.
But just as Lampley and Jones gushed Saturday, that certainly doesn't mean he's not worth watching.
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