Advanced Striking 2.0 - Canelo the Giant Killer
The greatest trick that old master of boxing, Floyd Mayweather Jr ever pulled was fighting Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez before the young Mexican star reached his zenith. Mayweather was thirty six years old and turned in undoubtedly the last great performance of his career in defusing Canelo’s speed, power and strength with craft and patience. Since then Mayweather has retired—as any forty year old boxer should—and occasionally returned for the odd cash grab exhibition. Canelo, however, has ascended to become the box office juggernaut of prizefighting. In 2018, DAZN signed Alvarez to an eleven fight deal worth a minimum of $365 million. He has since split with DAZN and returned: but wherever he fights and whoever’s name is on the marquee, Canelo commands the two most significant demographics in boxing: Mexicans and those who simply love spectacular knockouts.
For better or worse, Canelo Alvarez is the boxing business. The negative effect of his stature could be seen in his first fight against the equally brilliant but less commercially successful Gennady Golovkin. Against the smoothest and most experienced of counter punchers, Golovkin applied a dexterous, deceptive jab through all twelve rounds. Yet when the cards came in, it was as though the judges had determined the scores before the fight even began. But the upshot of Canelo’s position as king of the pay-per-view is that he can pursue any fight he pleases, no matter how ridiculous it seems. Rather than resting on his laurels, knocking down mandatory challengers and running up title defenses on paper, Alvarez has collected all four of the major belts in the light middleweight division, gone as high as light heavyweight to knock out the great Sergey Kovalev, and at the time of writing has booked a crack at the WBC cruiserweight champion, Ilunga Makabu.
Alvarez is a stylist about whom tomes can be written and who displays competence or outright excellence in every category and sub-category of the boxing game. He has the unfair combination of exceptional natural power, and world class boxing fundamentals in spite of it. We will explore the “standard” Canelo game in another chapter, but in this one we are going to examine something that Canelo, Manny Pacquiao, Henry Armstrong and a few others have made a specialty of: giant slaying.
A squat, square five-foot-seven, Alvarez has been on both ends of the speed equation as he has fought lightning fast welterweights like Amir Khan and ponderous middleweights and light heavyweights. In Canelo’s recent career he has played the part of the smaller man more often than not. Billy Joe Saunders and Danny Jacobs had decent height and range advantages over him, but the legitimate six footers that Canelo has met like Callum Smith, Caleb Plant and Sergey Kovalev have towered over him. Like the other great giant killers—Pacquiao and Armstrong—Canelo has adapted his usual style to deal with the different threats brought by a taller, longer, heavier opponent. Where Pacquiao’s approach was mobility, and Armstrongs was a mauling inside fight at a break-neck pace, Canelo’s work is a little more deceptive.
Small Man Fighting Tall
The old coaching maxim is to “take a tall fighter and make him taller”, or “take a short fighter and make him shorter”. The meaning is that the coach should always exaggerate the benefits of body type. Many great, stocky fighters have made excellent use of vertical movement, dipping and weaving and fighting out of a crouch. This is what is meant by “make a short fighter shorter.” If the punches are already coming down at you, you try to get underneath them. From Joe Frazier to Mike Tyson, the heavyweight division has plenty of examples of sawn off bangers who manage to get their opponent reaching down to them, and knock them out on the counter. Canelo stands in sharp contrast to that tradition. He has beautiful head movement and against opponents of similar height you will see him spread his feet and fight from a lower stance like a traditional boxer-puncher. But against much larger fighters Canelo walks out to fight in a notably shorter stance, standing at almost his full five-foot-seven. It is a position from which he can still move his head from side to side, but in which his legs cannot change his level so effectively.
Figure 1 shows the difference between Canelo’s stances. Frame a) is a position which places more weight over his lead foot, allowing him to slip to his left or duck to inside position more easily. This is the stance that he used against Golovkin, Cotto and other opponents of similar stature. Frame b) shows the position that Canelo adopted for his bouts against Kovalev, Plant and Smith. While Canelo is slightly crunched over at the waist in b), his feet are much closer together and his right foot is almost underneath his hips.
Fig. 1
Figure 2 shows how Canelo advances in this shorter stance, effectively performing the kind of back foot heavy walking that you might do when approaching the edge of a cliff. His rear foot is the plant, straight underneath his centre of gravity, and then he stabs his lead foot out ahead of him before drawing the rear foot up underneath him to bear his weight again. Canelo did not do much of his proper hitting in this shortened stance and it was really more of an intermediary position, but he spent far more of the fight in this shortened, high guarded position than he did in a traditional feet-spread stance.
Fig. 2
One of the trade-offs of this more upright stance is that Canelo cannot punish the jab as effectively as a Tyson or Frazier figure, for whom every missed jab was an opportunity to get inside the opponent’s reach and cause havoc. Canelo’s response to the jab is almost day one stuff: he keeps his guard high and—most of the time—he parries or stops the jab with his open right glove. There is some subtle head movement mixed in there and he will slip jabs and pull away from them, but his work is almost exclusively defensive—there is no urgency to take something back each time he makes a jab miss the mark.
Through the first half of his fights against Kovalev, Smith and Plant, Canelo was largely inactive. He simply walked up to his opponent and palmed their jab. The trick of it was that the jab was their safest option. In the event that Canelo’s opponents threw their right hands, they opened themselves up to counters and especially Canelo’s counter left hook. Canelo can throw this advancing by stepping forward from his shortened position, or more commonly he will do it by stepping back into a longer stance with his rear foot. Retreating into the left hook allows Canelo to throw his weight from his left foot to his right and club the opponent with a pure punch over the top of their right hand. Every time his opponent throws the right hand, it leaves their chin and exposes their jawline to the left hook. In terms of quality counter punching, Canelo’s best blows are available when his opponent gets frustrated and tries to power punch him off of them.
Fig 3
If Canelo were to try and use a deeper stance and slip to inside position he would also put himself in danger of the uppercut. It is simply one of the truths of boxing that the uppercut is the counter to a level change. Throwing it early and often will punish a fighter for trying to crouch or slip to inside position, and even spook them into standing more upright. By adopting a more upright stance from the start and only occasionally ducking to the inside, Canelo removes this danger. As Callum Smith tired of jabbing and moving, he decided the uppercut would be a good way to either hurt Canelo or slow his relentless forward march. Figure 4 shows what happened when Smith changed levels or dropped his right hand to initiate the uppercut (b): Canelo would sway back onto his rear foot, bringing his head in line with or behind his hips and making the uppercut almost impossible to connect (c).
Fig. 4
Alternatively Canelo would blade his body and drop his left forearm across the crook of Smith’s elbow as he attempted to uppercut, jamming the punch altogether, and crowding Smith without initiating a clinch and smothering his own hitting.
Fig. 5
This same framing tactic could be seen in periods of infighting against Caleb Plant along the ropes. Plant adopted a low lead hand and attempted to shoulder roll and counter as Mayweather had against Canelo years earlier. Canelo used one forearm to pin Plant’s lowered hand in place, and then began to club him with the free hand—whether that was a right overhand or a tight left hook.
Fig. 6
Attrition
Most longer, taller opponents try to use that advantage through their movement and their jab. They also open themselves to fewer counter punches behind that long, flicking, non-committal weapon. The noticeable trend in Canelo’s fights against giants is that through the first six rounds or so, Canelo is walking forwards trying to pick off jabs and get in the odd good shot. In the latter half of the fight, however, the volume of jabs from Canelo’s opponent inevitably falls. A fighter cannot double and triple jab and run around to the other side of the ring forever, and certainly can’t keep the same crispness and speed. When the jab stops coming for a moment, Canelo takes advantage. He will begin to score his own jab on the much taller opponents—a flicking, vertical fist blow that flies out ahead of him as if he is shooting his cuff.
Fig. 7
But the defining feature of Canelo’s shortened stance is that rather than sliding in and out of range with his feet roughly the same distance apart, he gives himself the choice to perform a full extension of his stance towards or away from the opponent.
When the lulls in his opponent’s jabbing become more pronounced, and Canelo’s own jab does not immediately cause a return, he begins to push his advantages. It is then that Canelo will step deep with his lead foot, slip his head off to the left and uncork a left hook to the liver, or perhaps jab into a wide right to the body. These serve as a clear demonstration of the issue with letting Canelo get close, and put the opponent right back to work trying to jab and move when he just doesn’t have the energy to.
Canelo’s freedom to extend into a longer stance away from his opponent means that he has found a use for pull counters against taller, longer opponents. Figure 8 shows this in action. Canelo’s shorter starting stance (a) allows him to stretch into a long stance as his right foot retreats (b) and his head never exceeds his feet.
Fig 8
Pull counters are not typically a sound strategy for shorter, stockier fighters against taller, longer fighters. The flaw in pulling away from blows to begin with is that a fighter remains “on the train tracks.” If the opponent is punching straight, the pulling fighter is hoping that the train runs out of steam before it reaches him.
Against an opponent of similar height and reach, pull counters can be accomplished from a longer stance and it is normally a matter of positioning yourself just on the end of the opponent’s reach. Some fighters will put their head out ahead of their hips to present a “false distance” and get the opponent to over-commit, then perform a pull counter. This is of course even easier against shorter opponents with a lesser reach—as can readily be seen in Floyd Mayweather’s pull counter masterclass against Juan Manuel Marquez.
Canelo’s use of pulls can be compared to those of the Muay Thai great, Saenchai. Saenchai has spent a great deal of his career fighting up in weight against much taller, heavier, longer and stronger opponents. Rather than bulldoze in on his opponents and try to keep as much of the fight in “his” range, Saenchai will stand on the end of his opponent’s reach and often draw them onto counters—pulling away from their attacks in theatrical fashion before returning. It is a style which, on paper, shouldn’t work because he is trying “tall man moves” on taller men, and yet it does.
Canelo’s short stance allows him leap back into pulls—as much an evasion with the feet as it is a trick of head movement. In his fights against taller opponents it serves as another punishment to the opponent deviating from the safe, reliable jab. While Canelo often slides back and claps the opponent with an intercepting left hook, the pull and return counters tend to score well with judges and spectators, and allow Canelo to load up his right hand. Any kind of power punch can be defused with a long retreating step, and Canelo will often return with a right straight to the head or a theatrical, swinging uppercut under the heart.
While the method is completely different, the goals of Canelo’s giant-slaying strategy are the same as Manny Pacquiao’s and Henry Armstrong’s: he wants to drive up the pace and increase his output over the rounds, where the opponent’s power will fade and his own speed and conditioning continue to frustrate. Canelo’s method seems a little blunter: he encourages the opponent to jab and move until they can’t really do it anymore. Callum Smith, Sergey Kovalev and Caleb Plant all have their own style and strengths but were forced into the same sort of fight against Canelo.
Against all three, Canelo’s output was very low through the first half of the fight—his work through the first six was almost entirely defensive, but always done moving forwards. In the latter half of all three fights, Canelo began to shift up through the gears and attack. Plant fell in the eleventh round, as did Kovalev, while Smith saw the final bell after spending the latter half of the fight swaying back into the ropes and trying to stay upright under a barrage of leather.
Triumphs of smaller men over larger ones are exciting anomalies in boxing on their own. When two equally skilled boxers meet, the larger one always has the advantage. But victories of smaller fighters over larger ones that do not comfortably conform to the “taller man boxes, smaller man infights” template are as rare as rooster teeth and well worth studying. If anything they serve to remind us that in the vast world of fighting—while coaching a fighter to make the most of his build is important—there is always more than one way to skin a cat.
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Check out the previous entries in the Advanced Striking 2.0 series: