LAS VEGAS — Mexican supremacy goes to Canelo Alvarez, whose battle for national pride against Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. on Cinco de Mayo weekend turned out to be an annihilation of the highest order.
There was no world title on the line when the bitter rivals stepped into the ring Saturday night before a raucous sold-out crowd of 20,510 at T-Mobile Arena, but there was so much more at stake: pride, country and all-time bragging rights in a raging feud that goes back years.
But instead of a fight for the ages, Alvarez dominated and outclassed Chavez to win the super middleweight fight going away, although he never came close to knocking down the iron-chinned Chavez.
All three judges scored it a shutout for Alvarez, 120-108, as did ESPN.com. No rounds were even all that close in one of the most one-sided big fights to go the distance in recent boxing history.
Alvarez (49-1-1, 34 KOs), 26, and Chavez (50-3-1, 32 KOs), 31, met a contract weight of 164.5 pounds, 9.5 pounds heavier than Alvarez, a former middleweight and junior middleweight world titleholder, had ever fought at and the lowest that Chavez, notorious for his issues making weight, had signed to fight at since he lost his middleweight belt to then-lineal champion Sergio Martinez in 2012. They both weighed in at 164 pounds and neither would step on HBO’s fight night scale to see how much weight they had put on since the weigh-in.
But any notion that Chavez’s considerable size advantage would help him was quickly dismissed and the talent disparity was obvious almost immediately. While Alvarez was quick on his feet and with his hands, Chavez plodded around the ring and threw one punch at a time in a woeful performance. He showed nothing but the heart to take the beating.
Alvarez opened the fight firing jabs and right hands over the top while Chavez was more cautious with his punches. Alvarez kept pumping his jab in the second round but also nicely mixed in combinations to Chavez’s head and body with his left hand before going back to the jab.
While Alvarez stalked Chavez and fired hard combinations, Chavez was limited to following him around and throwing one punch at a time. By the fourth round Alvarez was dishing out a beating and it was clear Chavez was going to have to do something dramatic to get back in the fight.
Alvarez landed two heavy right hands in the fourth round and Chavez had no answers as the crowd began to chant “Canelo! Canelo!”
In the fifth round, Alvarez landed a powerful right hand over the top that rocked Chavez and sent him reeling. He looked almost helpless against Alvarez’s attack.
By the end of the fifth round, Alvarez had landed 102 punches to Chavez’s 25, according to CompuBox statistics.
Alvarez continued to assault Chavez with head-snapping combinations in the seventh round of an absolutely one-sided fight. As if Chavez didn’t have enough problems, his left eye began swell and close in the seventh round. The beating continued in the eighth round as Alvarez landed a big right hand that snapped Chavez’s head back yet again.
Alvarez continued to do almost as he pleased until the end of the fight against a game but overmatched Chavez, who never landed a single big-time punch.
