Canelo still great, still loves to fight, still doing things his way
Mexican superstar defends unified super middleweight title vs. Berlanga
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LAS VEGAS — Canelo Alvarez, boxing’s biggest star and the lineal and unified super middleweight world champion, has been a professional for nearly 19 years through 65 fights and 496 rounds, and he is still going strong and loving every minute of it.
“I just can’t wait for Saturday night,” Alvarez said this week, his enthusiasm palpable.
In his 26th career world title fight appearance across four divisions, Alvarez will defend his 168-pound title for the eighth time by taking on the Brooklyn, New York-born Puerto Rican Edgar Berlanga in a Mexican-Puerto Rican rivalry fight on Mexican Independence Day weekend on the PBC on Prime PPV on Saturday (Prime Video PPV, PPV.com, DAZN PPV, 8 p.m. ET, $89.99) at T-Mobile Arena.
For his trouble, Alvarez will earn around $40 million as he continues to work with promoters on a fight-by-fight basis doing things his way.
That is what it is like to be at the pinnacle of the sport all these years later after going pro at age 15 and fashioning an all-time great resume that makes him an automatic first-ballot Hall of Famer and one of the greatest Mexican fighters of all time.
He has won world titles in four divisions — junior middleweight, middleweight, super middleweight and light heavyweight — and has unified and been the lineal champion in each of those weight classes except light heavyweight.
For many years he has been universally viewed as one of the top handful of fighters in the world pound-for-pound — for a time was he regarded as No. 1 — and has been picked as fighter of the year multiple times.
He has also become a very wealthy man, regularly ranking among the highest-paid athletes in the world annually. He has probably earned in excess of $500 million.
Yet all the accolades and money do not seem to have made him lazy. He is more the opposite of the kind of fighter referred to in a famous quote from the late middleweight legend Marvin Hagler, who once memorably said of staying hungry after so much success, “It’s tough to get out of bed to do roadwork at 5 a.m. when you've been sleeping in silk pajamas.”
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