Former blow-by-blow announcer for HBO World Championship Boxing Jim Lampley feels that Canelo Alvarez is facing uncertainty in his fight next month against Jermell Charlo on September 30th.
Lampley notes that Canelo (59-2-2, 39 KOs) has managed his career brilliantly, making fabulously rich, but making a mistake recently when he chose WBA light heavyweight champion Dmitry Bivol last year and was beaten.
Canelo has a huge fortune of over $200 million and has to find a reason to continue fighting because money isn’t enough any longer because he’s set for life with the generational money he’s made.
The 6’0″ Jermell has similar height & reach Bivol, and these advantages could be more than the 5’8″ Canelo can deal with if he’s unable to get to the inside to land his big power shots.
Losing to Jermell would be a massive blow to Canelo’s career, which is beginning to show signs of decline since last year.
Canelo has aged in the last two years, and he’s not the same guy that beat Billy Joe Saunders, Caleb Plant & Avni Yildirim in 2021.
We saw that clearly in Canelo’s last two fights against John Ryder & Gennadiy Golovkin. He’s lost a lot from his game and is now struggling to beat his opposition that he would have beaten with ease in the past.
What drives Canelo’s hunger?
“We’re reaching the stage of Canelo’s career at which you have to begin to question, ‘All right, what now creates the hunger and how well can he access all that hunger?'” said Jim Lampley to Fighthype about Canelo Alvarez.
Jermell has already revealed that he plans on using his height & reach to jab Canelo from the outside to focus on beating him on points. He’s not going to stand and have a dog fight because even now, Canelo is still dangerous due to his power.
“He’s wildly rich; he has managed his life very well up to this point,” said Lampley. “He managed his ring career with brilliance right up until the moment when he decided to fight a bigger, longer guy [Dmitry Bivol] and wound up biting off more than he could chew.
“So now he’s into this sort of no man’s land of ‘What fight do I choose which might still impress my public and won’t damage my reputation because I’m going to win it while I am tiptoeing around the subject of whether I’m going to fight Dmitry Bivol again.’
“He made the Bivol mistake. Now he has to deal with it one way or the other. I still believe that I pick Canelo Alvarez to beat Charlo, but some of that comes from the fact that I knew Crawford a lot better than I know Spence.
“I know Canelo a lot better than I know Charlo. I didn’t call any Charlo fights while I was still at ringside on the microphone, so I’m not equipped to judge him in the same way,” Lampley said.
Canelo facing uncertainty
“I’m not an expert, in other words, with regard to that, but I am an expert on the general career progress of Canelo Alvarez, and once you have established that you’re capable of losing, and you have been clearly beaten in a fight that you chose that, that you
chose because you thought you were going to win it, and now you’re in a whole new psychological territory,” said Lampley. “You know all sorts of new uncertainties are introduced.
“Taller, longer guys. He ran up against it when he chose to fight a taller, longer guy. He couldn’t get inside of Bivol the way he had against every other opponent other than Mayweather and so I don’t blame him for looking at Benavidez and saying, ‘Let me find somebody who’s a little bit more my height,'” said Lampley.
