On Saturday night, boxing’s biggest star returns to the ring when Saul “Canelo” Alvarez takes on Caleb Plant. The bout is a unification clash to crown the first four-belt super middleweight champion. It all goes down on Showtime PPV.
Things have already been heated between Plant and Alvarez, with a brawl briefly breaking out at a pre-fight press conference. Plant got the worst of that press conference brawl, suffering a cut under his eye, but the fight was never in jeopardy of being called off.
Those pre-fight antics were just another example of the evolution of Canelo, a fighter who has always had elite skills but has built a nasty mean streak in recent years. Plant is walking a fine line between trying to get in Canelo’s head and angering the sport’s top pound-for-pound fighter ahead of arguably the biggest fight of his career.
This week, Brian Campbell and Luke Thomas took a look back through Canelo’s career with an in-depth Resume Review on “Morning Kombat”.
Let’s take a look at two fights from Canelo’s career the CBS Sports experts believe to be his top career-defining moments.
vs. Gennady Golovkin II (Sept. 15, 2018): If there was a turning point in the career of Canelo Alvarez that best announced the dominant run he would go on to author in its aftermath, his 2018 rematch with Gennadiy Golovkin was it. Angered by the constant drug cheat allegations hurled at him by GGG, Alvarez made sure to make the kind of adjustments entering the rematch that would leave less doubt on the outcome following their disputed split draw the previous year. Alvarez took a cue from the “Mexican style” Golovkin boasted as his own and chose to stand directly in front of the Kazakh slugger to give just as good as he took in a classically pitched battle. By standing up to the bully and forcing him to take backward steps, Alvarez edged out Golovkin by majority decision and set a new tone for the type of destroyer he would go on to become at super middleweight. — Brian Campbell
vs. Billy Joe Saunders (May 8, 2021): I considered talking about the loss to Floyd Mayweather as a valuable learning experience for Alvarez, but the Saunders fight is not only the most recent, but also most relevant to the fight with Plant. Alvarez again had a fighter trying to play mind games and push buttons, with Saunders not only hurling insults but also pulling a late stunt with a refusal to fight over disagreements over ring size. Once they were in the ring, Alvarez stalked and pressured until Saunders found his legging and started to pick up some rounds through solid technical boxing. Alvarez has become a one-punch destroyer, however, and he countered Saunders’ successful boxing with a single, crushing punch. That one punch fractured Saunders’ eye socket in three places, causing Saunders to retire on his stool after the eighth round. How hard does an angry Canelo hit? “I thought, ‘Ooh, that’s a good shot, that’s a good shot,'” Saunders told TalkSport. “And I started bouncing about, but my eye had dropped down beneath my lid. I could see like two or three all the time and I realized after 30 seconds it wasn’t my legs, it was my eye.” Plant is playing with some serious fire by angering the Mexican superstar. — Brent Brookhouse
