It was the summer of 1989. I’d just turned 14 and was working at the Dairy Queen at the King of Prussia Mall, and the manager of the DQ, knowing I was a wrestling fan, asked me, “Hey, did you hear Mike Tyson is going to fight Bam Bam Bigelow?”

Yep, bizarre and unsubstantiated rumors could spread in the pre-internet age too. (No matter where you lived, I guarantee you heard the “news” that Mikey from the Life cereal commercials died from mixing Coca-Cola with Pop Rocks.)

But that’s not the point of this reminiscence.

The point, rather, is to shamefully admit that 14-year-old me, who wasn’t yet a boxing fan and didn’t understand any of the nuances of the sport, saw a mammoth, tattoo-headed (back before everyone was tattoo-headed) beast of a man, listed at 6-foot-4 and 390 pounds (probably actually about 6-foot-3 and 325) and kinda liked Bam Bam’s chances.

I was young. I was naïve. But my mindset at the time speaks to the base instinct most humans have when it comes to combat: Bigger is better. We struggle to picture the smaller guy hurting the bigger guy. When we envision a matchup in our head — at least when we’re young and/or naive and have not yet come to properly understand the science and the art of boxing — we default to, “Well, David doesn’t have a slingshot, so Goliath crushes him.”

The Tyson vs. Bigelow example is, of course, extreme and ridiculous on a number of levels. But I didn’t know any better at the time. I comprehended nothing about boxing, and I was a dumb teenager. Those are my excuses.

I’m not sure what the excuses are of the people who’ve been watching boxing for many years and still grossly overrate the importance of size.

Not that there weren’t perfectly valid, intelligent reasons to expect Saul “Canelo” Alvarez to defeat Terence “Bud” Crawford on Saturday night. There absolutely were.

It’s just that “Canelo is bigger, so Bud isn’t going to be able to hurt him” wasn’t one of those reasons.

Does size matter in boxing? Absolutely. The cliché “weight classes exist for a reason” — which I heard trotted out on a fair few podcasts in the last couple of weeks — has some truth to it.

But at the highest levels of the sport, when special fighters are involved, size just doesn’t matter nearly as much as most people think it does. Skill, speed, timing, defense, footwork, will to win — if you have the edges in these categories, as Crawford did, and as even the people picking Alvarez to win probably knew Crawford did, they usually render five or ten pounds of functional weight difference irrelevant.

Once again, I’ll go ahead and lean into making myself look stupid and provide examples of me not grasping this in my early days covering boxing.

Four months into my time on the beat, I covered from ringside Michael Grant pounding David Izon into a fifth-round stoppage, and I made up my mind in that moment that Grant was going all the way. He was 6-foot-7, 250 pounds, chiseled out of marble, long, strong — this was the guy.

A couple of years later, I picked him to beat Lennox Lewis for the heavyweight championship of the world. We all know how that went.

Even worse, perhaps, in 2003, when Roy Jones moved up to heavyweight to face John Ruiz, I predicted a Ruiz victory. Ruiz was coming off of wins over Kirk Johnson and Evander Holyfield — real heavyweights — and Jones was just a 175-pounder packing on a little muscle for the occasion.

In my partial defense, I thought Ruiz would have success leaning on Jones in the clinches and mauling him, as he did most of his other opponents, and ref Jay Nady decided from the start he wasn’t going to allow that.

But that’s a fractional defense at best. Ultimately, I got this one wildly wrong because I still assumed size mattered a lot more than it does. I got it wrong because, when I closed my eyes and tried to picture what they looked like in the ring together, I had trouble conceiving of a little guy beating up a big guy.

There’s a learning curve, as a boxing fan. You see it happen enough, and you eventually grasp it.

Insiders, experts and fans alike over the last couple of months reached for assorted fights to compare Crawford-Alvarez to, none of them quite perfect. The common thread was that there was a size difference in every example.

There was a whole lot of Sugar Ray Leonard vs. Marvelous Marvin Hagler. Not a bad comp, but a bit off because the steepness of the challenge facing Leonard owed at least as much to his three-year layoff as to the jump up in poundage to face a career-long middleweight.

There was also a fair bit of Manny Pacquiao vs. Oscar De La Hoya. Plenty of parallels there, but very different stylistically, with Pacquiao much more of a speed demon than Crawford, and with De La Hoya ultimately lifeless on that December 2008 night via some combination of aging and weight drain.

We also heard some Roberto Duran vs. Iran Barkley. Meh, Barkley wasn’t anywhere near Canelo’s level of greatness.

There was some Sugar Ray Robinson vs. Joey Maxim, which was somewhat applicable but ultimately swung on an outlier weather factor in an outdoor fight.

I caught wind of some Billy Conn vs. Joe Louis — reasonable, except Louis was one of the greatest punchers of all-time, still in his prime, whereas Alvarez hadn’t scored a stoppage in his last eight fights.

There was even some Jermell Charlo challenging Canelo, which … come on. Be serious. Don’t do that to Bud.

Anyway, for all the semi-reasonable chatter I heard, what I didn’t hear any talk of in the buildup to this fight was the name Oleksandr Usyk.

I’m not quite sure why. Usyk was the reason people should have learned prior to Crawford-Alvarez that size is not the decisive factor at the top level.

I realize Usyk’s experiences at heavyweight aren’t one-to-one with 154-lbs titlist Crawford challenging 168-lbs king Canelo because, technically, Usyk was already in the same weight class as Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury.

But look at the weight discrepancies: first AJ fight, 18.75 lbs; second AJ fight, 23 lbs; first Fury fight, 38.5 lbs; second Fury fight, 55 lbs.

Oh, and then Usyk gave away 16.25 lbs against Daniel Dubois in his most recent fight and knocked him out in the fifth round.

Usyk, like Crawford — and like Pacquiao, Leonard, Duran, etc. — is a truly special fighter, an all-time great, a man who can out-think very good opponents and even fellow Hall-of-Fame-bound opponents. He executed masterfully against both Joshua and Fury despite them towering over them, and he won because he was faster, craftier, more versatile, harder to hit clean and overflowing with determination and desire.

It struck me as overwhelmingly apparent that Crawford could do — not would do, but at least could do — something very similar against Alvarez.

I even have the receipts this time. In early June, I placed a bet on Crawford to win by decision at +225 odds. I was by no means confident he would prevail — I’m no Tim Bradley — but I leaned ever so slightly toward Bud, and figured if he did win, a decision was much more likely than a KO, and he only needed about a 30 per cent chance of winning the fight by decision for my bet to have positive expected value.

Over the weekend, one of my online sportsbooks put a 25 per cent odds boost on all method-of-victory markets for the fight. Crawford by decision was down to +210, but with the boost, it was +263. Sure, gimme some more.

If anything, Alvarez’s lousy performance against William Scull in May cost me money. I had made up my mind before that drudgery that I liked Crawford over Canelo if the fight ever happened, and Crawford surely would have had longer odds if the Scull fight hadn’t opened so many eyes to both Alvarez’s prime growing smaller in his rear-view mirror and his inability to track down a fleet-of-foot opponent.

Crawford was the wrong opponent at the wrong time for Alvarez.

Canelo is the biggest star of his generation and one of the best pugilists. Crawford is a lesser star but a better fighter.

He didn’t hit hard enough to really hurt the iron-chinned Alvarez, but he didn’t need to. He jabbed. He controlled the distance. He countered. He threw combinations. He used his feet and his southpaw stance and his defensive radar to render the relative heaviness of Canelo’s hands inconsequential.

In the seventh round, trailing on my scorecard but far from buried, Alvarez appeared to be losing his taste for combat as the quicker Crawford handcuffed and peppered him. In the 11th, by now fully buried on my scorecard, Alvarez was so discouraged by a jab to the kisser that he turned away for a moment, almost as if his pride was so damaged that a “no mas” crossed his mind.

Other than the fact that Crawford was perhaps a hair more cautious and defensively aware than usual, Canelo being bigger than him had no impact on the fight. You can’t hurt what you can’t hit, and Canelo, at least in his current ring-worn state, couldn’t hit Crawford. Not cleanly or consistently, anyway.

Is this the fight that finally makes it sink in? Is this the one that makes people who should know better start to know better?

Crawford was a junior middleweight (who’d recently been a welterweight) taking on a super middleweight (who’d recently been a light heavyweight), and that proved no disadvantage at all.

All other things being equal, sure, you’d rather be the bigger fighter.

But all other things are almost never actually equal. So I’ll continue to put my money on the better fighter.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.