Canelo: Biggest Ducker/Cherry Picker of All Time?

Charlo is trash

Kovalev was shot

Cotto was not a 160 pounder

Lara beat him

GGG beat him at least once

Mayweather smoked him

Bivol daddied him

 

I voted yes, but actually being among the worst, probably not the worst.

Wilder and Fury are already mentioned as very blatant duckers, with Wilder of course having been merely a belt holder but still.
But those are at least making a challenge for this generation.

 

Canelo ducked Benavidez, that's objective. Even now, there's already talk of Eubank Jr after Crawford, when instead in the super middleweight there are 3 contenders who deserve a chance, Mbilli, Pacheco and Iglesias, Canelo should face one of them if he beats Crawford (and honestly he should have faced them instead of Crawford since he is the undisputed champion in the super middleweight).

 

Because Bivol is fighting Beterbiev again, thats why no one cares about the supposed duck.

 

The bad thing about him is not so much that he doesn't fight good names but rather at what stages in their career he takes on his opponents and what a-side advantages he takes and that he now gets to hold all the belts while being able to choose his opponents freely and making use of it.

It seems to have been better in his early career when I didn't follow it yet, but also then I heard (maybe someone can correct me on this) that he was meant to fight golovkin if ggg stepped aside to let him fight cotto and afterwards instead of fighting him went down a weightclass again. I remember there was a phase where it seemed that he would jump (between super welter and middle i think) weight classes to fight the best names compared to their level/stage of career. And he always seemed to rehydrate like a water balloon which I find sketchy, even more so with the clenbuterol found later.

He started to jump weight classes later again when he took the opportunity to fight rocky fielding and a kovalev with too short a break after an exhausting fight with yarde. I have never seen kovalev fight like he fought against canelo. Pitter patter punches all the way, to conserve energy and last the rounds.

You know if a fighter knows he will lose against someone else that is just bigger and better that is fine to me, but not while holding belts hostage and dismissing those other fighters. I think his treatment of ggg seemed similar to that of benavidez only that with ggg he thought he had aged him out enough. And the scorecard... And then the religious fans that would defend every career choice of canelos, no matter how much they would rob boxing fans of the best fights possible at the time. Because in spite of all this maneuvering, canelo definitely was p4p.

So yes he fought great names all the time, but so did Joshua (and everyone calls him out for the average age of his named opponents).

Canelo has been the biggest name in boxing for quite a while with p4p status. You will have to go way back in order to find a 'biggest name in boxing' that did as much for his advantages (also a way to interpret 'biggest ducker') and the impact of his actions is simply magnitudes greater than that of any other ducker around, when everyone eyes the payday against canelo and he has all the belts.

It's not the names on his resume that make Canelo questionable, it's all the maneuvering and I think the better a fighter is, the harsher he should be judged! We're talking HOF here and he wants to be the mexican GOAT...

 

And the sanctioning bodies should be regarded as a sham! I think the general idea of boxrec with a simple elo-algorithm that determines strength of fighters by their fights is the right way (at least I think that's what they do).

Forget all the stupid belts with their history and force the world champion to defend against the number 1 challenger 2 times a year. You would still have matchmaking below that, but at least it would be matchmaking to get the best fights to get a lot of points to be able to challenge. And every champion could be undisputed and claim to actually be the best.

Won't happen because then they can't advertise as many fighters to be 'world champion' anymore and casual viewers are only interested in the idea of viewing the best.

 

Benzaviguez gotsa deviated septum.

 

Canelo is a crybaby and a disgrace. When is he going to avenge that lopsided Bivol loss?

 

The sanctioning bodies are shameful in my opinion, you can't say otherwise in front of certain behaviors, such as making Pacquaio fight for the world title in the return match after 4 years of inactivity. For me the best rankings are those of Ring Magazine, and their category champion is the true champion of that category.

 

Ring magazine rankings are mostly good as far as I saw them, but might still get biased or influenced later on depending on the occasion. And as long as other respected crook-belts are around propaganda can be spun in order to avoid fights and still have weaker fighters look better. Like how crawford spence seems to have been avoided, while spence was fed much more prestigious opposition. I wish those things would be driven out of boxing and we would just get the fights and 'marinating' would mean 1 or 2 fights, not until the end of the career.

 

The Ring Magazine rankings are very good and up to now they have not been influenced by the various bodies, in the future I do not know but I do not believe so. The problem is the rankings of the 4 world bodies and their world titles, and Ring Magazine cannot do anything about them. Unfortunately I do not see any real possible changes, in a positive way, in the near future. Let's console ourselves with the events, which are not lacking in this period, fortunately interesting matches continue to be there.

 

Nope, there are definitely worse cases but yeah, he's definitely a coward

 

No, not really. He's faced plenty of world champs and quality contenders throughout his career. He should have fought Benavidez after Benavidez beat Plant and I still hold out hope that fight gets made, but apart from that there hasn't really been a history of Canelo avoiding his biggest threats. Nobody wanted anything to do with prime Lara, he was super high risk and very low reward. Regardless of how you score that fight, it takes some cojones to take on someone like Lara who Canelo could have easily swerved for more lucrative paydays. He could have targeted guys like Cornelius Bundrage or Carlos Molina for titles during this time, for reference. No-one wanted to fight Golovkin around that time either, and guys like Saunders, Kovalev, Trout, and Bivol were all very respected fighters going into their fights with Canelo who were all supposed to be too slick or skilled or big for Canelo to beat (which turned out to be the case against Bivol admittedly, but the fact he took that kind of fight against a pretty unknown but highly skilled champion in the weight class above I think is a testament to how he seeks out challenges, or used to anyway).

Guys like Koki Kameda, Jake Paul, Zou Shiming, Sven Ottke, Beibut Shumenov, or most Thai title holders are far, far more egregious examples of very carefully managed fighters getting title opportunities off of beating very middling opposition and then sitting on a title defending it at home against even more middling opposition. Hell, there are plenty of guys who got to world titles solely thanks to mob connections back in the day, like Chuck Davey, most of whose biggest wins were believed to be fixed fights. To call Canelo the biggest ducker or cherrypicker OAT is nonsense, quite frankly, considering the wealth of fighters far lesser than him with far more pragmatically managed careers who all fought cavalcades of fighters leagues below world level.

 

Eh, sounds like fanboyism to me, a duck is a duck, I'm not really interested in double standards. Bivol is fighting a 41 year old man he arguably beat twice already rather than fighting the number 1 contender and mandatory to two of his belts and also made no qualms on fighting Benavidez, it's honestly pretty sad.

 

This is so ****ing stupid. Beterbiev was the lineal champ, and they are now 1-1. Arguably means nothing at all.
It´s two of the best LHW of their era going at it and settling this for good. Saying it´s a duck because Benavidez was made the mandatory challenger by beating a fellow 168lb guy is just laughable.

I cant wait for the Benavidez bubble to burst. I am genuinely sick of his ******ed fans.
And no, by no means am I fan of either Beterbiev or Bivol.