By Norm Frauenheim=
A catch-weight clause in the Canelo Alvarez-Erslandy Lara contract quickly became a forgotten controversy Friday when each fighter weighed in at 155-pounds at the MGM Grand for a Showtime pay-per-view bout Saturday night with a lot hanging in the balance, yet no significant title at stake.
It’s a mystery why a catch-weight was in the deal at all. Canelo demanded it. Lara was angered by it. There was a theory that it was Canelo’s way of saying he couldn’t make the junior-middleweight limit of 154 anymore. Perhaps, it’s a sign he’s moving up in weight to 160 after Lara, the World Boxing Association’s champion.
Or maybe it was just a question of money. Why pay the WBA a sanctioning fee? It would have cost Canelo three percent of his purse. According to contracts filed with the Nevada State Athletic Commission, Canelo is guaranteed $1.5 million, which doesn’t include an undisclosed percentage of Mexican television revenue. At minimum, he would have paid the WBA $45,000.
Whatever the motivation, Canelo (43-1-1, 31 KOs) saved himself and Lara (19-1-2, 12 KOs) some money. Lara’s contract guarantees him $1 million. Lara also walks away from Saturday night’s fight with his title no matter what happens.
Yet, Lara still looked like an angry young man at Friday’s formal weigh-in. After the fighters stepped off the scale, there was the ritual eye-to-eye, nose-to-nose pose for cameras and fans. Lara, about a 2-to-1 underdog late Friday, rolled his head one way, then another, in Floyd Mayweather-like fashion. It was a menacing bit of theater. But it didn’t seem to affect the ever-unflappable Canelo, who faced Mayweather in the same ritual before his loss to the pound-for-pound king in September. Canelo never blinked then. He didn’t blink Friday.
“I wanted to break his face then,’’ Lara, a Cuban, said in Spanish interpreted by manager Luis DeCubas Jr.
A crowd of about 4,000, dominated by Canelo fans from Mexico, roared its disapproval. Saturday night, Lara said, those fans will change their tone. He seemed to say that in the very least they’ll learn to respect him.
“They will find out exactly what the Cuban school of boxing means,’’ Lara said through DeCubas
But Canelo wasn’t buying into Lara’s school of thought.
“Tomorrow,’’ he said, ‘’we’ll find out who takes who to school.’’
Notes: Abner Mares weighed 126.5 pounds for his comeback in a bout with Jonathan Oquendo Oquendo also weighed 126.5 pounds.. …Ex-WBO featherweight champion Juan Manuel Lopez was at 130-pounds for his junior-light-weight bout against Francisco Vargas, who came in at 129.
