The fight is finally here. After years of will theys and won’t theys, the two top middleweights in the sport will step in the ring to face one another for divisional supremacy Saturday night on HBO PPV. Not only is this for the real middleweight championship, but Gennady Golovkin and Canelo Alvarez are also two of the biggest stars in the sport regardless of weight class. Quite simply, this is one of the best fights that could have been made in boxing today.
Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (49-1-1, 34 KOs) seems like he was always going to be a star. How could a talented red head in Mexico ever be anything else? Born into a boxing family, young Saul was the last of seven boys and a sister. All seven Alvarez boys have taken at least one professional fight. Ricardo, Ramon, and Rigoberto all became successful domestic level fighters in Mexico as well with Rigoberto even briefly holding an interim world title.
When one thinks about how older brothers treat younger brothers combined with how kids treat kids that are different, it suddenly makes sense that a redhead in Mexico with six older brothers would end up a fighter at a young age. Indeed, only at 15 years of age, Canelo, the Spanish word for cinnamon turned into a grammatically masculine form, fought his first professional fight.
By 2010, five years later, Canelo was a rising sensation on the Mexican domestic scene. While he was also main eventing cards south of the border before even his 20th birthday, his big American breakthrough came against Jose Miguel Cotto on the PPV undercard of Floyd Mayweather Jr’s fight with Shane Mosley. After surviving some early drama in that fight, the Canelo hype train was roaring down the tracks in the United States.
Four fights later in 2011, Canelo picked up his first belt against England’s Matthew Hatton. After a couple easy defenses, it is sort of forgotten now how the Mexican legend in the making insisted on fighting basically everyone available at the weight. When Josesito Lopez derailed his plans of a Victor Ortiz fight, Canelo insisted on fighting Lopez. When Austin Trout looked like a terrible matchup after upsetting Miguel Cotto, Canelo insisted on fighting him.
At 23 years old, Saul Alvarez even insisted on fighting Floyd Mayweather Jr. While that night remains the only blemish on his record, it didn’t slow him down. Canelo’s next four opponents were Alfredo Angulo, the extremely avoided Erislandy Lara, James Kirkland, and Miguel Cotto, all wins. This is a murderer’s row of opponents with Lara being a particularly bold opponent selection. In the end, Canelo had his hand raised all four times.
It was that last fight where Canelo picked up his public perception problem though. Miguel Cotto was coming off a bit of a super fight in which he moved up and took on longtime middleweight champion Sergio Martinez, winning in shockingly dominant fashion. Cotto wasn’t really a middleweight, but Canelo was struggling to make junior middleweight so they decided to fight at 155 lbs, one pound into the middleweight division. When Canelo narrowly won, he picked up a middleweight title as sort of an afterthought.
The problem here was Gennady Golovkin (37-0, 33 KOs). Fans were excited to see Canelo in against who they believed was the best middleweight in the world. Given that Golovkin was the mandatory challenger to the belt Canelo had just won, it seemed a logical matchup that would excite the sport. Yet, instead of fighting his mandatory challenger and the man everyone wanted to see him in against, Canelo instead met glass chinned Amir Khan moving up from welterweight two divisions down.
This fight created a lot of outrage and seriously tarnished the reputation that the young Mexican star had built. I don’t think it was a case of Golovkin being ducked directly by Canelo, however. Alvarez’s promoter, Golden Boy, had recently lost basically all their top fighters to then upstart Premiere Boxing Champions outfit. I read the situation as Golden Boy himself, Oscar De La Hoya, not being willing to risk his only real moneymaker left, but the truth didn’t really matter here. The perception was that Canelo was afraid of Gennady Golovkin.
It didn’t help when Canelo would drop a tough line about Golovkin after a fight only not to meet him next, again and again. To make matters even worse, when the WBC ordered Canelo to defend his title against the Kazakhstani star, he and his team instead decided to essentially throw the belt away and cut all ties to the sanctioning body instead of taking the fight. To this day Canelo will still not fight for a WBC belt. If he wins Saturday night, Golovkins WBC strap will become vacant instead of going over the Mexican star’s shoulders.
Following the poorly received Khan fight, Alvarez dropped back down to junior middleweight for one fight to win another belt against England’s Liam Smith in a fight no one was asking for while the world clamored for the Golovkin fight. Most recently, Canelo moved up past middleweight even to take what seemed like an easy big money fight against overmatched but popular fellow countryman Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. Suddenly Canelo, whose team had always dodged the Golovkin fight on the idea that Canelo wasn’t really a middleweight, had taken a fight up above that within the super middleweight limit.
Thankfully after that tedious contest while still in the ring, the fight was finally announced as happening.
Gennady Golovkin took his own unique path to get to this moment. A 2004 Olympic silver medalist, GGG initially signed a German promotional contract and looked to build his career in that excellent fight country. While the wins and knockouts piled up, Golovkin really struggled to build his star. Even after winning his first world title in 2010, Gennady still found himself unable to lure in the top German fighters to build his name against.
Eventually the man known as Triple G just stopped trying and called a mid-career audible by uprooting his career to the United States. This would prove to be the best decision that the Kazakh knockout artist made in his career. HBO elected to broadcast his first defense stateside and instantly he was off to the races. One by one, known names like Gabriel Rosado, Curtis Stevens, Daniel Geale, Martin Murray, and more fell before him without a single fighter making it the distance. The mixture of Golovkin’s savage knockouts in the ring and his charming, affable, almost comedic persona outside of it was a hit with American audiences.
It was a fight with Marco Antonio Rubio that planted the seeds for GGG’s second belt in the division. When it became unclear whether or not the WBC middleweight title would be defended by the Cotto/Canelo winner as both were really junior middleweights, the organization created an interim title just in case it was needed. If the winner of that fight were to drop back to junior middleweight, then the interim champion could be elevated to the status of full champion. If not then two could be ordered to fight. What could go wrong?
Canelo’s refusal to fight Golovkin at that time is now a part of this legend that we already discussed above, but by him doing so Golovkin’s interim belt was elevated to full WBC title status and he became a unified titleholder. A dominant stoppage win over fellow power puncher David Lemiuex gave him his third belt in the division. Only Billy Joe Saunders’s WBO belt now eludes GGG as he has been unable to secure that fight.
Golovkin’s two most recent fights tell a story separate from belts though. One year ago, Golovkin countered Canelo’s much derided fight against welterweight Amir Khan by bringing up his own welterweight in Kell Brook to fight. Though Golovkin literally broke Brook’s face and stopped him in only fight rounds, he also got hit a lot along the way. It was the first time he had really looked vulnerable. Then, defending against a large, athletic middleweight in Daniel Jacobs in March, GGG looked downright human in only narrowly winning a decision in a fight that could have been scored either way.
At 35, this could all mean the Gennady Golovkin train is slowing down naturally due to age. I more read it as Brook and Jacobs being really good fighters, but the idea that Team Canelo only took the fight because they believe Golovkin is a little past it is now part of the narrative too. Maybe there is some truth to it. I can only imagine that fighting a man probably does become a little more appealing when he is not on a twenty three fight knockout streak. Either way, we are only days away.
That is the story on how the fight became what it is today in terms of the fighters’ journeys and their particular joined narrative. What about the fight itself though? Most fortunately, it looks to be a really good one. Maybe a little too lost in all this shared history and finger pointing is the fact that these two match up very evenly with styles that are all but guaranteed to make for a fun fight to watch.
Golovkin will come forward behind calculated aggression while Canelo will most likely back up and look to counter with explosive combinations. Though the still somehow only 26 years old Mexican is happy to fight off the back foot at times, neither of these guys is a particularly defensive minded fighter. Both like to be aggressive and put serious pop behind their leather. How will Canelo deal with the power and pressure coming from Gennady Golovkin? How will Golovkin deal with the sustained offense coming back, particularly to the body, from the younger man?
I still favor Golovkin late here, potentially by stoppage. I do see Canelo having a ton of success early, but unless he can seriously hurt GGG, I just see him getting worn down by a new level of strength from a particularly strong full sized middleweight in his unified champion of an opponent. I don’t feel particularly confident, however. Maybe at 35 GGG won’t have the energy to put that pressure on late, maybe he will fade instead. Maybe he won’t be able to deal with sustained body work. This is a great fight that could go a variety of different ways.
The answer to how this fight plays out will cost $79.99 on HBO PPV starting at 8 PM Saturday night. That is a steep price, but for once it seems worth it. This is no sideshow attraction like last month’s PPV. Boxing at its best will be on display Saturday night.
This will be a very easy win of Canelo, almost a fraud fight, this boxer always has 10 to 15 pounds weight advantage – GGG can not hurt heavier rivals, while Canelo resists easily punches of 173 pounds fighters like Chavez. GGG’s punchs will not cause any damage in Canelo. Probably KO in 7 rounds or less. Boxing rules must change, the weight must be checked 2 hours before the fight, not 30 hours before. Canelo must fight with Kovalev or some other in 175 or 180 pounds.