Canelo Alvarez stopped Billy Joe Saunders after eight rounds Saturday night to win their super middleweight unification fight at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.
The fight was closely contested until Alvarez landed several punishing blows in the eighth round and began to beckon the record crowd. Saunders’ right eye swelled shut and the fight was called off between the eighth and ninth rounds.
Alvarez improved to 56-1-2 with 37 knockouts, and his latest triumph came in front of an announced crowd of 73,126. That broke the record for the largest indoor crowd for a boxing event that had previously been 63,350 for the Muhammad Ali-Leon Spinks rematch in 1978.
That was some bullshit.
He was ducking out of canelos punches the whole fight and it was working great until it stopped. Canelo finally got his number. The tide was about to change. His corner knew it and so did he so they did what they thought was smart. It was a pure bitch move . This is pugilism. Thousands of people went to that event. Hundreds of thousands spent money to watch it. Only a idiot sucka would pay to see him again.
I didn’t see a very close fight. I think BJS might have scored enough to have won 2-3 but every shot canelo was landing was a thudding blow and multiple body shots stopped Joe in his tracks mid combo and had him retreating.
Billy joe was winning the majority of rounds.Canelo was landing 1, 2 and sometimes 3 power shots in a round, billy picked up steam and the 6th and 7th looked amazing. Canelo was missing but Canelo caught him hard and you cant put yourself in Billys shoes but it would of been an epic story if he continued… he showed he has the ability it is a shame he never enshrined it.
My thoughts exactly, I had Canelo up 4-0 then BJ maybe won a couple on points but I never had any doubt who’d win that after the first ten minutes. Weird fight, weird commentary, weird ending.
“I saw when he’d broken his cheek bone and when I went back to my corner and told Eddie I didn’t think he could continue… broken his cheek bone, when you break your cheek bone you can risk your life and you can’t continue that way”
It was some of the worst commentary I’ve ever seen.
They had a terrible sense of who was winning. Canelo was clearly winning. BJS had a few good rounds, but was nowhere near winning the fight.
They criticized a very good corner stoppage. BJS was completely fucked up from that uppercut. Canelo thought he broke BJS’s face, and he was probably right. After that injury, there was no chance of BJS winning.
Look at Koscheck’s career after the second GSP fight. He had no chance of winning but endured more and more punishment. Most boxing corners would have stopped that fight and they would have been right to do so.
Most experienced boxing corners would have stopped the BJS fight at the exact same time. It was the right call. Canelo knows that, too. The few exceptions show why boxing corners stop fights like this. Look at what happened to Margarito’s career when his corner didn’t stop a fight when he broke his face.
I had no doubt he had fractured his orbital at the time, and to be clear, that’s a devastating injury.
He was ducking punches the whole fight without consequence. Until late in the fight where he got caught doing it 3-4 times. Canelo finally got his number. Had he been winning/ have canelos number there’s no way they’d stop that fight. Was it a smart stoppage by the corner? Yes he was likely going to get finished.
He doesn’t deserve a pass though IMO. At the end of the day they stopped the fight because he was going to loose. That shouldn’t just be accepted IMO. Not when there’s that much on the line. If it was an amateur fight by example I’d be perfectly ok with it.
