Until a recent change in the buildup to this weekend’s super middleweight title unification bout, when pound-for-pound king Canelo Alvarez began speaking publicly in English and largely stopped pulling punches of any kind regarding just about everything, interviewing the Mexican superstar had become a typically predictable affair.
Sure, the 30-year-old Alvarez was always polite and cordial. With his red hair and action hero looks, the native of Jalisco in Guadalajara befit the role of boxing’s leading man in nearly every category. Yet his interviews were bland, short, direct and, once again, extremely predictable.
The one constant Alvarez (55-1-2, 37 KOs) would hammer home each time was how willing he was to face the toughest opponent possible each time out, regardless of network or promotional affiliation, in order to back up his claim that he’s the best boxer in the world.
Lucky for boxing fans, Alvarez actually meant it within an era where boxing/businessmen like Floyd Mayweather wielded a ton of leverage and control, flaunted it at every turn and ultimately relied upon on it to strategically face his toughest challenges on a timeline most favorable to his advantages.
For the majority of his career as a pay-per-view headliner, which began with a loss to Mayweather in 2013 at the age of 23, Alvarez has carried himself differently. Despite a few missteps — from waiting out Gennadiy Golovkin an extra 18 months before their first fight to failing a pre-fight drug test for tainted beef ahead of their rematch — the good Alvarez has done as the face of the sport in the post-Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao era has far outweighed the bad.
This is a point best hammered home in the details of Saturday’s three-belt unification at 168 pounds against Billy Joe Saunders (30-0, 14 KOs), which will take place in front of 70,000-plus fans inside AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas (8 p.m. ET on DAZN, sign up now).
Alvarez, who will defend his WBA and WBC titles against Saunders’ WBA belt, could to the casual eye be facing merely yet another faceless U.K. name with a glossy record and no chance of unseating his throne. Recent opponents from the same region like Callum Smith, Rocky Fielding and Liam Smith brought various level of challenges on paper to Alvarez — none of which were able to be materialized inside the ring against him, however.
But the 31-year-old Saunders is a different type of cat altogether, which makes Alvarez’s willingness to seek him out all the more impressive given that he could fight just about anyone he wanted and still demand a life-changing financial purse for his efforts.
Saunders, a native of Hertfordshire in Great Britain, is a southpaw with a distinctly unique boxing style and the willingness to operate in the kind of frustrating style that is hard to look good against at times and even harder to defeat.
For as hard as Saunders, a stablemate of WBC heavyweight champion Tyson Fury, is to hit cleanly inside the ring, he’s even harder to pin down on the negotiation table or stand across from at a press event and not expect to be trapped inside some kind of mental game.
Those deception skills came to the forefront this week when Saunders successfully negotiated for a larger ring that would better help his chances for victory by being able to box on the outside by using movement. How did he do so? Saunders publicly threatened to pull out of the fight if he didn’t get his way and whether he was ultimately willing to do just that or this was more of a publicity stunt mixed with a bit of gamesmanship, the brash Brit proved successful.
And yet, true to form of his character, all Alvarez would say publicly after the near-debacle was figured out is that the ring size doesn’t matter. Not bad for a fighter who went out of his way to fight someone who other stars simply aren’t lining up to do the same against in a bout that has legitimate opportunities to become a trap fight for the sport’s biggest star.
