Sergey Kovalev suffered a controversial loss to Andre Ward the last time one of Kovalev’s fights went the distance in Las Vegas.
Conversely, Canelo Alvarez has won closely contested, 12-round fights against Erislandy Lara and Gennadiy Golovkin, and secured a controversial draw with Golovkin in Las Vegas in recent years. One judge, CJ Ross, even gave Alvarez a draw when he clearly lost to Floyd Mayweather Jr. six years ago in “The Fight Capital of the World.”
Kathy Duva, Kovalev’s promoter, is well aware of their very different histories in Las Vegas as Kovalev and Alvarez wind down their training camps for a November 2 showdown at MGM Grand Garden Arena.
The judges for the Kovalev-Alvarez fight will be revealed at the Nevada State Athletic Commission’s next monthly meeting, scheduled for October 23 in Las Vegas. As is the case in all championship bouts contested in Nevada, Kovalev’s team has input as far as which judges NSAC executive director Bob Bennett will present next week for the commission’s approval.
“We asked, as always, for judges that will be fair,” Duva said during a conference call Tuesday. “We hope that the commission recognizes that we don’t want the names of the judges or the referee to be the story. And I’m pretty sure they see it the same way.”
Whomever judges the 12-round, 175-pound bout between Russia’s Kovalev (34-3-1, 29 KOs) and Mexico’s Alvarez (52-1-2, 35 KOs), Kovalev’s handlers have implored him to give the judges little choice but to score rounds for him when the WBO light heavyweight champion faces the obvious ‘A’ side of a fight DAZN will stream live.
“Look, we’re gonna be with a crowd that is gonna be very much pro-Canelo,” Duva said. “We know that happens. We know that judges are influenced by those crowds, and I could chalk a lot of this up specifically to that. But what Sergey needs to do is to fight like the veteran that he is. He needs to win and dominate round by round. He needs to not go in there, head-hunting, trying to get a knockout. He knows that now. And again, the experience that he’s had has informed that. If you look at the scoring of the first six rounds of the first Ward fight, you know, he was ahead, clearly. He let Ward back in the fight. He got tired.
“We’ve addressed those issues with the training situation. I don’t think that’s an issue anymore. He needs to go out there and win and dominate, just as he did [Eleider] Alvarez the second time and, frankly, as he did with [Anthony] Yarde. When we went and re-watched the [Yarde] fight, there was about 20 seconds during one round in which he was having a little bit of a hard time. But he dominated that fight, and that’s what he needs to do.”
Kovalev knocked down Ward during the second round of their initial meeting in November 2016 at T-Mobile Arena. Ward withstood that trouble, rallied during the second half of their 12-rounder and finished ahead by the same score, 114-113, on all three cards to narrowly win a unanimous decision.
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.
