What to expect when Canelo and GGG step into the ring on Saturday night
LAS VEGAS — If you have any doubts about what kind of fight you can expect to see on Saturday at the T-Mobile Arena here when Saul “Canelo” Alvarez takes on Gennady “GGG” Golovkin for the long-awaited unified middleweight championship, well, let’s allow the participants — the boxers and the men who guide them — to put your mind at ease by describing what should unfold once the bell rings.
“There’s going to be a lot of punishment on both sides,” Alvarez (49-1-1, 34 KOs), the lineal middleweight champion, said this week. “That’s what I’ve been seeing, that’s how I envision the fight and that’s what we’re prepared for, for fights like this.”
“Fights like this” happen when you put two 160-pound men — likely 10-15 pounds heavier by fight night — with good speed and footwork, unusual power in their fists, no fear to hold them back and so much on the line inside a 20-foot-by-20-foot ring. Abel Sanchez, Golovkin’s longtime coach, explains.
“We are looking forward to a great fight — a dramatic, explosive fight. These guys have the styles that will make for a fight that we will all remember," Sanchez said Wednesday. “The things (Canelo) is saying tells us he wants to fight. He’s not going to run. He’s going to stand in the middle of the ring or at least close to Gennady to make it a fight. He’s talking about knocking out Gennady. So that tells me that he just wants to fight, which is great for all of us.”
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High-action exchange matches are a boon for the sport, especially if you have to pay top dollar to watch them. The Mayweather-Pacquiao mega-fight in May 2015, at $100 a pop, angered so many of the 4.3 million who paid three figures to watch a ho-hum fight that it set the sport back years and nearly killed boxing’s PPV business.
That won't be the case in this bout, which you can see on HBO pay-per-view (8 p.m. ET).
Both Golovkin, who holds three of the four major middleweight belts, and Alvarez have high knockout percentages — Golovkin’s is a whopping 89%, thanks to a 23-fight KO streak that ended with a unanimous decision against Daniel Jacobs in March. Canelo has had some spectacular KOs in recent years. He knocked Amir Khan out so viciously in May 2016 that he kneeled down beside Khan after the fallen fighter lay there for a few minutes, worried that he had really hurt the British fighter.
A year earlier, Alvarez used one of his most potent weapons, the uppercut, to drop James Kirkland, who crumpled to the canvas and didn’t get up for awhile. Canelo seems equally adept and powerful using both hands on the uppercut.
The 35-year-old Golovkin (37-0, 33 KOs) has put a hurting on many opponents along the way, including bloodying Canadian knockout artist David Lemieux at Madison Square Garden in 2015 in an 8th-round TKO, and breaking Kell Brook’s eye socket early in his stoppage of Brook in England a year ago.
Brook, however, told SkySports recently that he believes GGG’s days are numbered. After Golovkin’s narrow defeat of Jacobs, Brook said, "Now they know he is human. He can be hit and he can be out-boxed, he can be beaten and top fighters are going to go in with that mentality. As long as they have trained properly and believe in themselves, they will beat this guy at middleweight."
Alvarez, 27, a slight underdog, certainly feels like he’s the one to do it. Asked what will guarantee an explosive fight, Alvarez said through translator Robert Diaz, “(Golovkin’s) style is an aggressive style that comes forward, comes to knock out, and I’m a counter-puncher that’s going to be right there, countering him strong.”
What makes Alvarez so dangerous, Sanchez explains, is that “He’s got very fast hands and very good counter-punching combinations. He throws combinations in a row, four or five shots, that’s one thing we cannot allow him to do, get into a rhythm like that.”
So how will Golovkin stop that? “Not necessarily with punches but with something. Golovkin is very adept at cutting off the ring and feinting and being in position to take your mind away from what you were thinking," Sanchez continued. "We have to be working for three minutes of every round.”
Alvarez, though, might have summed up the gist of this showdown best when he said, “There’s going to be moments I have to take risks to attack his body, to attack his head. I need to be thinking and not be a target for him to just hit,” he said.
“Every night before going to bed I visualize the knockout," he added. "It’s something I prepared for. I trained for the knockout.”
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