There’s a big prize fight this weekend. Well, as big a prize fight as can take place in 2025. Terence “Bud” Crawford and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez go at it Saturday night in Vegas with all the super middleweight belts at stake. Among the oodles of intriguing plot lines that make this matchup of two of the sweetest scientists of their generation worthy of a football stadium full of spectators and any fight fan's attention is one of boxing's most accepted adages ("Good big man beats good little man") being put to the test.
Plus, there ain’t no tomato cans in this fight. Crawford, who turns 38 years old this month, has been fighting professionally since 2008. He comes in with a perfect 41-0 record, with 31 of those wins by knockout. He’s never even been knocked down. But because he’s refused to stray from his native Omaha, Neb., for a more media-friendly burg, Crawford got little mainstream acclaim until a July 2023 bout with then-undefeated and fabulously regarded Errol Spence for the undisputed welterweight crown. Crawford fights are routinely things of beauty, but on this night he turned in as great a big-fight performance as I’d ever seen from anybody. Both fighters weighed in at the 147-pound limit, but Spence never looked like he was in Crawford’s class. Crawford had vastly superior speed and power, and better defense and counterpunching abilities than Spence, his pre-supposed equal. Every punch Crawford threw landed with consequences. The precision and oomph of his jab was otherworldly. Crawford knocked Spence down three times and was ahead on all scorecards by nine points by the time referee Harvey Dock humanely stopped the fight with 30 seconds left in the ninth round. (Watch the whole fascinatingly one-sided affair here.)
Spence, previously considered one of the best pound-for-pound fighters on the planet, hasn’t fought since the beatdown.
But Crawford has also been bizarrely inactive in the two years since that career-defining fight. His only post-Spence bout came in August 2024 when he moved up one weight class to take on Israil Madrimov for the WBO super welterweight title, with a 154-pound limit. And at the new weight, for the first time in his career, Crawford looked rather pedestrian. Against a competent but hardly otherworldly Madrimov, Crawford’s punches seemed slower than they did as a welterweight. Crawford ultimately won the fight by unanimous decision, but the scorecards were close.
Instead of fleeing back down to the welterweight division after the lackluster Madrimov outing, Crawford decided to keep punching up. He’s jumping two more weight classes, to 168 pounds, to face Canelo, the super middleweight champ and the biggest draw in boxing since Floyd Mayweather’s retirement. And Crawford’s taking the fight without any tuneup bouts at the new weight to see how his vastly bigger frame suits him. Boxing fans and the sport's Saudi power brokers have been calling for a Crawford-Canelo bout for a while. Canelo, a Mexican who ESPN has called the most popular Latin athlete in the world and whose career earnings have to be approaching $1 billion, has proven over time he can generate media attention and big box office against any opponent. Fighting Crawford will be good for his legacy, for sure, but he was never going to shrink in size just to make that fight happen. So he gave Crawford a super-middleweight-or-nothing offer. And so now Crawford will come into the much-hailed “fight of the century” weighing in at 21 pounds heavier than he did just two bouts ago. That’s a big leap.
Yet the most mind-boggling stat in the tale of the tape for this bout could be that Canelo, at 35, is more than two years younger than Crawford. If it seems as if Canelo (career record: 63-2-2 with 39 KOs) has been in the public eye for decades, it’s because he has. His first professional fight came way back in October 2005, and his biggest bout to date, a loss to Mayweather, took place 12 years ago this week. And, hell, he’d already had 43 fights by then!
Canelo has also had his own wake-up call about how size matters in boxing. He moved up to light-heavyweight in 2022 to take on Dmitrii Bivol. Canelo was a massive betting favorite in his first fight at 175 pounds, but found himself being dominated by the essentially unknown but bigger Bivol, who won by unanimous decision and gave Canelo his first and only loss since the Mayweather fight.
Unlike Crawford, Canelo seemed to learn a lesson when things didn’t go so swell carrying so much weight. He immediately dropped down to super middleweight for the last fight of his controversial but undeniably spectacular trilogy with the Gennadiy Golovkin. The legendary Triple G had never fought above 160 pounds until that 2022 fight with Canelo; the Mexican fighter, who by then was used to fighting with a bigger frame, won convincingly. Golovkin retired after that bout with a 42-2-1 career record; both losses and the draw came in the rivalry matches with Canelo.
Canelo has stayed at 168 pounds since the Golovkin win, and stayed busy: He signed a reported $400 million multi-fight deal earlier this year with boxing’s current sugardaddy, Riyadh Season promoter Turki Al-Sheikh. Canelo’s first appearance under the new pact came against William Scull in May 2025. Canelo’s fight against Crawford had already been announced by then. Scull, a Germany-based Cuban fighter, spent 12 rounds running from Canelo. So complete was Scull’s refusal to engage that it appeared the Saudi promoter had ordered him not to throw any punch that might land and mess up the megafight.
Now that bout is finally here. A win by Crawford at super middleweight could debunk the sport’s big man > little man theorem and even call into question the utility of weight classes. Yet some pundits give Crawford a real good shot at taking Canelo’s crown (including Tim Bradley, the best commentator in the fight game these days). Memories of Crawford’s virtuosic vanquishing of Spence still remain strong. And anybody looking for a reason to believe in Crawford can find precedent in Sugar Ray Leonard vs. Marvelous Marvin Hagler, a 1987 tilt that ranks as one of the biggest and best bouts in boxing history.
Leonard had never fought for a title above welterweight before coming out of retirement to take on Hagler for the middleweight crown. Hagler, meanwhile, had never fought at any weight other than 160 pounds, and had never lost. If Leonard wanted a piece of the reigning king of the ring, it would have to be at middleweight. And in a fight that managed to live up to its incredible hype, Leonard relied on footwork, handspeed, brains, chin, and oh-so-much heart to overcome the power and bulk differential and get a split-decision win. But barely: Leonard’s margin of victory in this matchup of two all-time greats was just one round on one judge’s scorecard. What a fight that was!
Boxing, to put it mildly, could really use some of that from Canelo vs. Crawford. Here’s hoping it delivers. I can’t wait for the opening bell.
