LAS VEGAS ? For the past few weeks, Canelo Alvarez has had to, concurrently, sell his bout with Amir Khan; discuss a potential future bout with Gennady Golovkin; and deal with the pressures that come from assuming the mantle of boxing’s biggest star.
There are a lot of responsibilities on his plate that he hasn’t previously had to consider. His inability or perhaps unwillingness to speak English has always lightened his promotional load in the past when he’s come to the U.S. And though he’s taking English lessons, he has done all of his interviews this week in Spanish.
Never in the past was he asked questions like he’s been asked this week, such as his thoughts on presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s views on immigration. For the record, Alvarez said he finds Trump’s comments “offensive.”
Nor has he had a truly big fight in which he was the guy like he is in this bout and where the majority of the bout’s success from a business standpoint rests on his shoulders. In 2012, when he fought Shane Mosley, a huge name in the business, it was on the undercard that was headlined by a Floyd Mayweather-Miguel Cotto pay-per-view.
In 2013, his bout with Mayweather became, at the time, the second-best selling pay-per-view in history (2.2 million) and first in revenue generated. Alvarez’s appeal as an unbeaten young slugger who could be the first one to defeat Mayweather played a role in the show’s runaway success, but the truth is that Mayweather carried that promotion.
And last year, when he won the WBC middleweight title by defeating Cotto, it sold a reported 900,000 pay-per-views, helped greatly by the presence of the Puerto Rican superstar in the other corner and his large fan base.
Alvarez on Saturday will make the first defense of the belt he lifted from Cotto. He does it against Khan as the headliner of the first boxing show at the T-Mobile Arena. Khan is an exceptional draw in the U.K., but he’s an unknown entity as a pay-per-view attraction in the U.S.
It will be Alvarez who has to sell the show if it is to approach anything close to the numbers he did with Cotto last year.
Most importantly, though, is that he has to be prepared for the actual fight.
Alvarez has a distinct size advantage, as he’ll likely enter the ring Saturday in excess of 170 pounds (though the limit for Friday’s weigh-in by contractual agreement between the sides is 155). For all of the talk and posturing between Alvarez and Golovkin about a potential future fight, with Alvarez insisting that Golovkin agree to a catch weight lower than 160, Golovkin’s team swears that Alvarez is actually the physically bigger man.
With everything that’s swirling around Alvarez, it is hard to lose focus on what is most important, and that’s what happens in the ring.
There was a time in Mayweather’s career when he wasn’t the huge draw he was from 2007 through the end of his career in 2015. When he first turned pro through perhaps 2004, he was regarded as a poor ticket seller.
His first three pay-per-views, against Arturo Gatti (369,000), Zab Judah (378,000) and Carlos Baldomir (320,000), barely cracked a million combined. Those are solid pay-per-view sales, but numbers he routinely mocked after his 2007 bout with De La Hoya sold nearly 2.5 million.
Alvarez was actually a better draw in his early days than Mayweather was in his. But Mayweather found a way to make himself not only the biggest name in boxing, but one of the biggest names in sports or pop culture.
And he did it while winning every fight he took, most of them by extraordinarily wide margins.
A loss, as Alvarez found out in 2013 when he was outboxed by Mayweather, isn’t a death knell for a fighter as a pay-per-view attraction by any stretch.
But a loss to Khan would certainly put a major dent into his drawing power.
Alvarez is a heavy favorite, but Khan is a good boxer whose hand speed could pose problems. And trainer Virgil Hunter has raved about the progress Khan has made and the courage he has.
Khan swears by Hunter and said he’s improved by leaps and bounds since they began working together several years ago.
Hunter believes Khan is good enough to defeat Alvarez, not just give him a tough test.
“[Amir] has been through so much in his career with adversity, but here he is willing to step up two weight classes and then some to prove he got into this sport to show he has a legacy and fears no one,” Hunter said. “I learned this early on from him. I was amazed the first time I saw him spar, and his attitude is amazing. He will walk right into the face of adversity.”
He needs to be elusive and not be flat-footed in front of Alvarez. That would simply make it easy for the Mexican star to impose his size on him.
To hear Khan talk, he may wind up fighting Alvarez much like Mayweather did, not so much turning the bout into a track meet as one of twists, turns, angles and timing.
Alvarez has to be ready for the best Khan ever, because Khan has to know this is his biggest shot.
He says he is. His promoter says he is.
We’ll see.
De La Hoya knows as well as anyone this side of Mayweather and Mike Tyson how hard it is to be focused on the task at hand in the ring with all of the responsibilities that come with being the sport’s biggest star.
It’s Alvarez’s first time in this spot, and the pressure is on him to perform.
