Following Terence Crawford’s sensational victory over Saul “Canelo” Alvarez last month, the loser’s performance has gotten fairly little attention. Crawford, climbing two weight classes to meet Canelo at his favored 168lbs, showed an iron chin and a sniper’s accuracy over the 12 rounds.

Alvarez, meanwhile? The majority opinion is that he was perfectly fine. He threw hard body shots and loaded up on right hands – more or less what he had done in his previous four wins since losing to Dmitry Bivol. Certainly he was sprier than he appeared in May’s sleepy summit with William Scull. He just couldn’t quite match the skill of “Bud.”

“I’m not taking nothing from [Crawford],” Angel Garcia recently told FightHype, running through a list of Bud’s accolades. “But Canelo looked like he’s burned out.

“He had three fights in a year,” Garcia said, referring to Alvarez’s fight with Edgar Berlanga in September 2024, Scull and Crawford. “That’s a lot for his record and the time he been around.”

Alvarez, 35, has indeed racked up a lot of wear and tear over the course of his professional career, which began when he was just 15. (He is opting for elbow surgery after the Crawford fight and will return later than his planned February 2026 date.) Though he has never been knocked out or even down, Alvarez – on top of the accumulated punishment from 20 years of fighting – has had particularly bruising fights with the likes of Gennadiy Golovkin and Bivol. 

“Triple-G will hit you with that fucking hook like that,” Garcia said, pounding his fist into his open hand with a loud slap to punctuate his point. “Right on top of your skull. He hit Canelo with some shit.” Crawford, Garcia opined, was in the right place at the right time to take advantage of Alvarez’s slippage.

Asked whether Alvarez’s avoidance of David Benavidez affects his legacy, Garcia said, “Well, Canelo was smart on that one, but he should’ve been smart with Terence Crawford. He shouldn’t have fought Terence Crawford.”

Owen Lewis is a freelance writer with bylines at Defector Media, The Guardian and The Second Serve. He is also a writer and editor at BoxingScene. His beats are tennis, boxing, cycling, books, travel and anything else that satisfies his meager attention span. He is on Bluesky and can be contacted at owentennis11@gmail.com.