On November 2 in Las Vegas, unified middleweight champion Canelo Alvarez is looking to add to his legacy when he goes up two weight classes to battle WBO light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev. Because of his age(36) and his inability to take sustained work to the body, many believe that Kovalev will lose to Alvarez.
According to former world champion Timothy Bradley, Alvarez is moving up because Kovalev is not the fighter he used to be.
“Canelo is a smaller guy coming up to this weight class,” Bradley recently said. “He’s going to take that risk because Kovalev is kind of “watered down” a little bit. He’s been a little “long in the tooth,” so I think that’s the reason why he’s taking that risk.
“He sees an opportunity to break Kovalev down to the body. That’s his specialty, so he’s willing to take that risk and go up to fight at 175 pounds against a guy like that.”
It seems that this could be a one-fight thing for Canelo at 175, but if Alvarez does stick around at 175, fighting unified light heavy champion Artur Beterbiev, who stopped Oleksandr Gwozdyk on Friday, is a bad idea, according to Bradley.
“I don’t think so. I don’t think he wants that,” Bradley said. “I really don’t think Canelo wants that, that’s pain.”
Canelo’s move to 175 is similar to Roy Jones’ move to heavyweight to fight John Ruiz back in 2003. Jones did not try to fight Lennox Lewis, who was a belt holder at that time, he wanted to fight a guy he knew was beatable, and obviously, Alvarez is not going after Beterbiev. He is fighting a guy that he believes is beatable as well. We’ll see if that is the case on November 2.
Photo: Top Rank/Mikey Williams
