By Bart Barry-
Friday brought what announcement boxing craves – a superfight! And here it is: May 6 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas Mexican cinnamonweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez will trade hands with Mexican chavezweight champion Julio “Son of the Legend” Chavez Jr. at the celebrityweight limit of 164 1/2 pounds. What we know of boxing contracts assures us even this loopiest of catchweights remains open to negotiation till opening bell – and without mandatory-minimum sentencing there’s good a chance of Chavez weighing over 200 pounds on May 5 as under 165 – and so as to ensure competitive bidding there are still threats of returning to the stadium where the Dallas Cowboys play, whatever it’s currently called, but if you’re a Mexican national booking his Cinco de Mayo vacation plans anywhere but Nevada, eres un payaso.
The obvious temptation is to go full misplaced aggression on this fight and use it as a convenient metaphor for what plagues our oncebeloved sport as if such metaphors composed a paucity, and of course for those GGG fans who long for a fight that justifies their ardor by legitimizing their guy last week’s announcement brought more ire – which says lots about the chances they honestly give a post-Pirog Daniel “Miracle Man” Jacobs, and the word ‘honestly’ must be emphasized because the promotional center of boxing is about to pretend Jacobs is a daunting foe, maybe even dangerous as David Lemieux – but Cinnamon versus Son of the Legend is an actually intriguing prizefight in spite of itself. It’s not what boxing needs, but who in the hell even knows what that is anymore? Boxing’s woes now need remedies prescribed in years, not fights, so it’s way outside the point to accuse any fight anylonger of not benefiting the sport that, were it not for certain broadcasters’ bespoke budgets, would soon find itself remanded to UFC undercards in the U.S.
This fight will sell hugely among Mexicans largely because it is so exclusively Mexican – it has nothing to do with WBC titles (though one gets giddy imagining what sanctioning ploys Consejo Mundial de Boxeo has planned) or official records or contrived gravity and legacy; it will feature two Mexicans who at least partially resent one another’s acclaim in the sense one man’s acclaim taxes the other’s revenue in the finite if inelastic Mexican boxing marketplace. From an aficionado’s perspective this fight made much more sense when this column prescribed it six years ago but from a promoter’s perspective it’s good a time as any.
Chavez ate himself hastily away from Canelo before HBO succeeded in making Canelo the draw he is now – HBO’s interest in Canelo began with the network’s stint as “an Oscar De La Hoya-search company that populates its undercards with Al Haymon-managed trial balloons” until Haymon bought Showtime and now HBO’s interest in Canelo is some combination of wanting exclusivity with the last guy in the sport who moves the pay-per-view needle and selfinterested altruism: without HBO as a partner Golden Boy Promotions probably wouldn’t see fiscal 2018 and then HBO would be stuck broadcasting solely Top Rank cards and every single product of the former Soviet Union’s amateur program.
Which brings us limping towards Son of the Legend whose career and life were shortened by his 2012 match with middleweight champion Sergio Martinez. Never a picture of discipline before Maravilla calmly, crisply, cooly diddled his cranium hundreds of times Chavez Jr. lost his remaining impetus thereafter and snuck through the next two years and two sizable paychecks beating on Brian Vera before changing his manager and promoter and advisor and getting bitchmade by a limited Pole named Andrzej Fonfara. Rumors of Chavez’s reform persist as ever, but making fights in El Paso and Monterrey as Chavez has done for the last two years has convinced no one Chavez is on the fruitful side of his career, and therefore the time is now for making a fight that proves nothing, but again, so what?
It’s no insight to say Golden Boy Promotions cannot afford to get Canelo beat; Cinnamon is nowhere near frightened of Gennady Golovkin as Oscar De La Hoya is since Canelo is not using his fortune to supplement more than a car collection and some houses while De La Hoya is using Canelo to subsidize a whole lot more. There’s no chance De La Hoya or HBO thinks Chavez can beat Canelo, but Chavez can beat Canelo, and Mexicans know this because whatever fuzziness Chavez’s lifestyle has brought his fighting trim the fact remains Chavez took Martinez to the quivering precipice of a knockout, and that Martinez was better in every way than Canelo.
The Maravilla whose career Chavez effectively razed in 90 seconds was creative and mobile and talented as any fighter Canelo has faced including the Floyd Mayweather who embarrassed him in 2013. And Chavez came a punch from snatching Martinez’s consciousness with nothing but size and will; he measured the physical disparity between a man who walks the earth at 210 pounds and starves to 160 and a man who had to eat his way up from 154 and invested in it by being hit relentlessly for 34 minutes simply for a chance to spend one minute whacking that smaller man with impunity.
Canelo is naturally larger than Martinez but not nearly large as Chavez, and if Canelo plans to stand in the pocket and counterpunch with Chavez he will get hit. No evidence has surfaced Canelo’s whiskers aren’t stiff but 36 minutes with Chavez should moisten them for Golovkin (unless Canelo can sue revenue projections for another year of PPV showcases), and therein lies the delicious irony of this money grab: In seeking one last enormous payday for Canelo before his reckoning with Golovkin the Cinnamon handlers ensure their man’s eventual middleweight-unification match will be a cashout.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
