By Bart Barry-
SAN ANTONIO – Into this friendly city whose citizens have been generally vigilant about Covid, vigilant as local officials have required, many multiples more vigilant than state officials have, strode Canelo for his fourth Texas prizefight, second in Alamo City. If it wasn’t his easiest Texas fight it wasn’t his most difficult either. Which is a surprise and a half – since Callum Smith, the man Canelo beat up Saturday, was by far the most accomplished prizefighter Canelo has fought in Lone Star State.
What you opined of Saul Alvarez’s Saturday performance depends mostly on what you opined of Smith on Friday, what you opined of an undefeated Ring champion who’d won his title by knockout in the finals of a single-elimination tournament. I learned this lesson about opinion’s effect, contrasting my feelings about Spence-Garcia a few weeks back and Alvarez-Smith Saturday.
I did not think particularly highly of welterweight Garcia, after opining quite highly of him at 140 pounds, and Spence’s workmanlike decision did next to nothing for me, aesthetically. I opined quite highly of Callum Smith, and it rendered me thrice as susceptible to commentator hyperbole about Canelo.
It’s probably in the word subtlety. When man’s most primal impulses manifest themselves subtly, perhaps someone with a microphone’s shining you. While lots of subtle things happen in any confrontation, there is nothing subtle about a man’s consciousness being removed from him on television; in the absence of that spectacle recourses to subtlety deserve be discounted.
Canelo has come a long way since his last Alamodome match, hasn’t he? Then, Canelo made his sixth defense of his first WBC title, a 154-pound trophy he won beating Matthew Hatton (the EBU European welterweight titlist at the time). Canelo won a fair, unanimous decision over Austin Trout. I was ringside for that. Till that point I rated Canelo below “Son of the Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. among anointed Mexican prizefighters. If Canelo wasn’t fully a promoter-manufactured entity he was having an awfully easy run – that would end in humiliation with Floyd Mayweather, five months after the Trout fight.
Watching Canelo from ringside afforded something watching Chavez Jr. did not, though. On television Canelo didn’t have much an identity more than redhaired horseman from Jalisco. With Marco Antonio Barrera and Erik Morales and Juan Manuel Marquez still active, at various levels of decline, Canelo mightn’t have been among his country’s best five prizefighters, while being promoted as if he’d eclipsed all of them. I went to Alamodome in 2013 half expecting Trout to undress him.
I was disabused of that in round 1. The first time Canelo let fly a hook, actually, I noticed he had access to an entire other level from Chavez Jr.’s. I’ve written about it before, but Canelo has a different sort of intensity than television shows.
Back then, too, Canelo was given to one defensive-clinic round every fight, a round when he tried to be Will o’ the Cinnamon, showing aspirational levels of head and shoulder movement. It was corny – like a voluptuous Instagram model in prop glasses with a caption that reads “Beauty AND BRAINS!” Saturday showed Canelo’s cornball defensive rounds weren’t wrong but early. Across from Erislandy Lara, Mayweather and Trout, men with better reflexes, Canelo was too slow to make his feints look even hopeful.
The higher Canelo moves in weight, though, the more a defensive genius he appears. Against Callum Smith he showed a defensive awareness that set Twitter ablaze with comparisons. It might be inferred the worst loser Saturday was not Smith, in fact, but “Saint George” Groves and by further inference late-career Carl “The Cobra” Froch. How bloody sluggish must Groves’ve been to make such a bull and bully of a man limited as Callum Smith?
Smith was wholly unprepared for Canelo’s intensity, for his presence, for his speed even, Saturday. A giant of a man, Smith went from graceful athlete to gangly reluctant in fewer than three minutes. Late as round 6, I continued hoping like a loon a limited Brit might surprise a fully actualized Mexican prizefighter with a left hook – makes me chuckle at myself, typing that – then Canelo just about broke Smith’s left arm in half with a righthand or two. By round 9 Smith’s corner was threatening its charge with the white feather. The championship rounds were about one more hopeless UK fighter’s grit.
There wasn’t an obvious opportunity to ice Smith so Canelo didn’t try very hard, which earned him some derision from what GGG deadenders Canelo sneered at in his incompetently translated postfight chinwag. Healthy as he feels and looks at 168 pounds Canelo hasn’t an inkling to weigh one ounce less to retire Gennadiy Golovkin, who didn’t rehydrate to the super middleweight limit Friday.
Without HBO around anymore to sensationalize Soviet Bloc fighters to feed Canelo, and without any obvious rivalries between 168 pounds and whatever Andy Ruiz weighs right now, and with his agency as a selfpromoter freer than ever, Canelo has some planning to do. If he’s serious about unifying titles at 168 pounds – he needn’t be; he has The Ring title already – he should forego whoever holds the IBF belt and unify WBC titles in a match with David Benavidez, who at age 24 is at least as good as Canelo was when he lost to Mayweather at 23. Maybe that fight would go the way of Crawford-Benavidez. Maybe it wouldn’t.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
