A Fight For the Ages?

On Saturday, Terrence Crawford will fight Canelo Álvarez for the WBC, IBF, IBO and WBO super middleweight titles. The event will be held at Allegiant Stadium, home of the Las Vegas Raiders, and broadcast on Netflix. As the streaming platform’s first legitimate megafight, Saturday’s television audience will be larger than anything Álvarez, a longtime commercial superstar, has seen, its stage bigger than anything Crawford, long deserving of commercial superstardom, has ever experienced. It may be the sport’s best matchup in years, and one, tantalizingly, whose outcome defies easy prediction. 

The fighters are similar in age, but while the 37 year-old Crawford (41-0, Omaha, Nebraska), has fought 41 times as a professional, his resume is less expansive than the 35 year-old Álvarez’s (63-2-2, Guadalajara, Mexico). When Canelo first came to Las Vegas in 2010, he had already fought 32 times as a pro and American fame came fast. His rising profile was enough to win the boxing lottery in 2013, when he was chosen to headline a pay-per-view event against Floyd Mayweather Jr., to whom he lost by majority decision in a bout that laid bare his inexperience and teased the coming success. Like this Saturday’s event, that fight was held on Mexican Independence Day weekend – one of the sport’s most lucrative dates, which Álvarez has come to own as his stardom has grown.   

Since then, Álvarez has regularly engaged the sport’s biggest names, among them Gennady Golovkin, whom Canelo tied once and beat twice in their memorable trilogy; that he emerged on top is a tribute to his professionalism, toughness, and in their first fight, a draw, some inexplicable judging. While the Mayweather bout – where, despite early his professional experience, Álvarez was rightly seen as an apprentice in with a master craftsman – did little to hurt his reputation, it took a taller, longer Dmitry Bivol to give Canelo his second, more searing defeat in 2022. Since then, he has won six times in a row, all by unanimous decision. 

Crawford benefitted from none of the promotional thrust that pushed Álvarez onto North American television sets. A native of Omaha, he has long been seen as one of the sport’s best fighters, but rarely has his name travelled outside of boxing. Unlike Mayweather, Crawford is not a willing marketer and has appeared content to build his name making waste of boxing’s best, as he did during his 2023 masterclass versus Errol Spence. That version of Crawford – in which he battered an excellent fighter then considered the world’s top welterweight – produced one of the most dominant performances in decades. 

In some ways, Crawford is the antithesis of Álvarez. Promoted earlier in his career by Oscar De La Hoya, Álvarez truly was his generation’s golden boy – a handsome power-counterpuncher who assumed the mantle of Mexico’s next star, fighting with an obdurance made more impressive by the growing stages on which he expressed it. Canelo’s blend of polished, albeit conventional skills, willingness to fight top opposition and enviable chin satiated a Mexican fanbase for which success and gameness were two sides of the same coin. By comparison, Crawford worked in early obscurity, his genius arriving a generation after Mayweather’s and still shrouded by Floyd’s long shadow. He is not a media darling, nor does he appear to care about endearing himself to the general public. Beyond his uncommon boxing skills, this is part of Crawford’s appeal. 

In a sport where fighters motivate themselves with paranoid complaints of disrespect, Crawford stands alone as a master of grievance. No slight will go unavenged, as Montrealer Dierry Jean, who in 2010 promised to batter Crawford in the lead-up to their fight, learned during his brutal loss in Omaha. The Nebraskan thrives on his self-perception as someone whose accomplishments have been overlooked. There is a demonic quality to the way he relishes these beefs: a malicious smile usually forms, and a threat follows. The bedrock of his fighting identity is not skill or savagery, despite having ample amounts of both – it’s Crawford’s assurance of his own indomitability (a trait that Álvarez and most great fighters share, although perhaps not to the same degree). To give anything less than Crawford’s best would be a personal betrayal. This is why he fights as though his soul were on the line. 

Despite the panther-like menace that comes through his eyes, Crawford is facing the most consequential test of his career on Saturday. While the American is an inch taller with longer arms, Canelo is a naturally bigger man, with his blocky midsection, bulldog neck and a chin that three times held up to Golovkin’s battering ram. Crawford can punch but a knockout seems impossible, and so the question becomes whether he can use his blend of skills to fluster the flatter-footed Álvarez. For his part, Canelo has become more adept in cutting off the ring over his career – of stalking, rather than waiting – and Crawford, while durable, can be hit. The American has looked vulnerable a few times throughout his career, and while the frequency of these instances were too few to question his staying power, they all came in fights against much smaller men, none of whom represented Canelo’s danger.

Can Crawford use his savvy to keep Canelo at a distance? Moving up in weight, will he have the physical endurance to nullify the advantages in power and experience of a hardened super middleweight? At an even more basic level, can the American do anything to dissuade a tested tough guy from moving forward? For Canelo, does he still have the same drive that marked his rise in boxing? He’s appeared to coast in recent fights, but none of these opponents had Crawford’s rubik’s cube complexity, and it will be interesting to see whether this forces a greater urgency from a fighter known for his poise. If it’s a long fight, will Canelo’s fitness falter, particularly if Crawford’s elusiveness forces him to move for twelve rounds?

Whichever form the bout takes, both men have shone in their biggest moments. The fighter that provides a final answer to these questions will determine not only who rules boxing’s middle weights, but which man’s identity – that of the unconquerable, that of the champion – will remain intact. 

Prediction:

While betting against either man feels unwise, Terrence Crawford will defy disadvantages in size and middleweight experience, relying on technical brilliance and savvy to upset and out-land Canelo, taking a close decision.