By Thomas Gerbasi
With Alex Saucedo’s record sitting at 24-0 with 15 knockouts and Abel Sanchez manning the corner, it’s evident that the 22-year-old welterweight is on the verge of a step up sooner rather than later. And while Friday’s bout with Wilberth Lopez in Chicago isn’t that fight, Saucedo isn’t losing sight of the task at hand.
“I do have that feeling,” he said when asked if he feels that the bigger fights are on the immediate horizon. “Now having Abel on our side and after how my last performance went and how I’ve been looking in sparring, I feel ready, but I’ve got to get this one out of the way first.”
It’s what you want to hear from a prospect: eager, but not too eager where he can slip-up against a fighter not on his level. With Top Rank promoting him and Sanchez there for guidance, Saucedo will get the right fights. What happens in those fights is up to him, and while he’s young enough to be impatient, he’s already been in the game long enough to know the right path to take.
“It’s a little hard (being patient), but I’m young, and I know my time will come,” he said. “It’s just a matter of time. I have to just keep working hard and keep learning because I’m gonna need it for those big fights. But I do feel like I have plenty of experience for those fights, and I’ll get there.”
A nationally televised gig against Lopez is the perfect fight for him at this point in a career that began when he was just 17. But after making steady progress on the southwest circuit, bringing Sanchez into the mix may prove to be the game changer for the Oklahoma City product, especially since he gets to see fighters like middleweight champ Gennady Golovkin on a regular basis.
“I stay motivated in the gym and when I was training around GGG and other champions, I saw how they work and how they’ve gotten to where they are, and that keeps me working for those things I want, like championships.”
In March, Saucedo was in the packed Theater at Madison Square Garden to fight on the same card as his Top Rank stablemate Michael Conlan, which they will do again this Friday. In the opposite corner was Johnny Garcia, a fighter with a 19-4-1 record who was coming off a decision loss to Jose Carlos Ramirez in which he dropped the unbeaten 2012 Olympian in the second round. So while he wasn’t a world-beater, he was a solid vet until Saucedo made him look like he didn’t belong in the ring, rocking him in the first before finishing him in the second.
With that win in the Big Apple, it was made clear that Saucedo is going places, and to get there, he will have to continue doing things most people his age don’t.
“There are a lot of things you have to sacrifice,” he admits. “One of them is leaving my family. My daughter is four years old and starting school. I have to leave her and my wife to go to camp for eight, nine weeks and it’s hard. But it’s a sacrifice you have to make to get there and I know I’m at the right place.”
Call Saucedo the oldest 22-year-old in the world, and he laughs. He’ll take that badge of honor and keep pushing, because even five years into this, he’s just getting started.
“I’ve gone through a lot since I turned professional,” he said. “It’s been a long five years, but we’re taking everything good – step by step, fight by fight. I train hard for every fight and I like to come in a hundred percent every fight and I’m going to keep it that way until the end of my career.”