Alvarado Says He Overlooked Ruslan, Will Retire Marquez

By Luis Sandoval

Losing a fight in boxing comes with harder repercussions in today’s game as most people feel you’re only as good as your last performance. Mike Alvarado and Juan Manuel Marquez are both coming off tough defeats but that’s not stopping them from facing each other in a very interesting and high stakes matchup.

Alvarado has been waiting for a big name fight to come his way and now that he has a chance to face Juan Manuel Marquez in the inaugural fight at the newly refurbished Forum in Inglewood, CA, he feels beating Marquez would be the best redemption for him.

“I’m excited bro knowing I’m fighting a legend in the boxing game. It makes that standard higher. It makes me dig that much deeper and train that much harder. It gives me more determination and dedication to do what I need to do to win this fight. I’m redeeming myself from a loss so this is redemption for me. Redemption for me is by retiring Juan Manuel. That being said, that’d be the best thing I could do in the game of boxing,” Alvarado would tell BoxingScene.

That excitement and desire to dig deeper was not existent en route to his fight last October with hard hitting Ruslan Provodnikov. Having the fight in his hometown of Denver, CO also proved to be a double edged sword as he had a homecoming fight but the distractions at home coupled with looking for bigger opportunities proved to be disastrous.

Alvarado admits he did not train properly but has learned from that experience and knows what he needs to do in order to not let that happen against Marquez.

“I’m already training deeper and stronger than I already was [for the Provodnikov fight]. I was looking past Provodnikov; I wasn’t looking into him or looking at him. I was looking past him and looking for bigger fights and that plus the people and the distractions was on top of that. It was tough and not balancing that out the way I needed to was different. But where I am now, I took a real huge learning experience from that and I know what I need to exclude myself from to be better,” said the former Light Welterweight champion.

Alvarado will be training in Los Angeles for his upcoming bout and is thrilled to get the opportunity to fight in a historic arena against one of boxing’s biggest names.
You can follow Luis Sandoval on Twitter and Instagram @Truewest007