Boxing’s greatest superstar, Canelo Alvarez, put on a dominant show Saturday night to close out the main battle slate of 2020, unanimously winning previously undefeated champion Callum Smith and winning the WBA, WBC and The Ring magazine super middleweight titles .
The scorecards show 119-109, 119-109 and 117-111, all for Alvarez.
In front of 15,000 fans (20% capacity) at the San Antonio Alamodome, Alvarez (54-1-2, 36 KO’s) stalked Smith (27-1, 19 KO’s) to punish him with a series of consistent jabs, uppercuts and hooks for 12 laps. Alvarez became the first united champion from Mexico in super middleweight history.
“I am the best in the world,” said Alvarez through an interpreter on the DAZN broadcast. “In the first round I tried to see what he brings, the skills or whatever, but as you can see, I showed what I am.”
In the final rounds, the plot of the fight shifted from who would win to whether Smith would survive Alvarez’s deadly blows and go far.
The 6-foot-3 Smith had a seven-inch height advantage and an eight-inch reach advantage over the 5-foot-8 Alvarez, but it didn’t matter as Canelo was the big bully on Saturday night, cutting the distance Smith prefers falling away and consistently pounding punches from his head and body.
“He was the better fighter tonight,” Smith said. He’s smart. He’s smart. He sets little traps for you and keeps you thinking. Before you know it he closes the ground. He’s a good fighter, but I’m just a little disappointed in myself. His sting was really good. It surprised me. me a little bit. His defense was really good. “
Alvarez has now defeated two Smith brothers – he knocked out older brother Liam Smith as a junior middleweight in 2016 and now beat Callum Smith as a super middleweight by unanimous decision in 2020.
Widely regarded as one of the best two pound-for-pound boxers in the world, the best-selling boxer and already a four-division champion, Alvarez has now won the title of The Ring magazine in three different weight divisions. He landed 43% of his punches and 57% of his powerful punches, per CompuBox, in a complete performance that also featured his defense. Smith only landed 18% of his punches and 24% of his powerful punches.
It was Alvarez’s first fight since leaving Golden Boy Promotions and DAZN following contractual disputes, returning to the ring for the first time in 13 months as his own promoter with little rust in the ring.
Even at 30 with 57 professional fights, Canelo is still looking solid in his prime. He’s still intimidating fighters who often switch to survival mode as soon as they feel those blows, and it’s getting hard to find someone in the super middleweight division who can give Alvarez a real threat.
But Alvarez said after the fight that he feels great in the super middleweight division, noting that he doesn’t want to fight with the shell. His main goal is to unite all the belts in the division with Billy Joe Saunders currently holding the WBO belt and Caleb Plant holding the IBF belt. But the bigger question is whether Alvarez will agree to a trilogy fight with Gennadiy Golovkin after two highly controversial fights that ended in a draw and Alvarez’s victory.
“I’m not running from anyone. I just showed that I fought the best,” said Alvarez. ‘If he wants to go into battle, I’ll take it. But I just showed that I fight the best. ‘