Unified super middleweight champion Canelo Alvarez (62-2-2, 39 KOs) dominated previously unbeaten WBA mandatory Edgar Berlanga (22-1, 17 KOs) by a lopsided 12 round unanimous decision on Saturday night at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
Canelo knocked Berlanga down with a left hook to the head in the third, but the New Yorker got back to his feet and fought well for the remainder of the contest. Berlanga mostly used his jab instead of his power shots tonight.
The judges’ scores were 117-110, 118-109 and 118-109.
“Hopefully, I’m going to be a future legend, representing Puerto Rico,” said Berlanga after thie fight. “I took his best shot in the third round. I got up and took his best shots and returned it. My jabs, I wish I had landed more. He chose a Puerto Rican fighter. I got a little bit of Mexican in my blood. He gave me an opportunity, a young, strong Puerto Rican fighter.”
Undercard results
In another very dull fight on tonight’s card, WBA middleweight champion Erislandy Lara (31-3-3, 19 KOs) defeated a non-mentally engaged Danny Garcia (37-4, 21 KOs), stopping him in the ninth round.
Lara, 41, knocked Garcia down with a weak left hand in the final seconds of the ninth. After the round ended, Danny’s father pulled the plug on the fight rather than letting him come out for the tenth.
Garcia was coming off a two-year layoff and wasn’t throwing many punches. He looked like he wasn’t mentally there tonight. He was too small, too ring rusty, and too outclassed by Lara. PBC messed up by using Danny Garcia for Lara to fight in the co-feature bout and tarnished the card tonight.
– Inactive former IBF super middleweight champion Caleb Plant (23-2, 14 KOs) bounced from a loss in his last fight to stop Trevor McCumby (28-1, 21 KOs) in the ninth round to win the WBA interim 168-lb title. The time of the stoppage was at 2:59 of round nine.
Referee Allen Huggins stepped in and waived it off near the end of the ninth when Plant trapped McCumby against the ropes and unleashed an avalanche of punches.
The fight was far from easy for Plant early on, as he was arguably dropped twice by McCumby, hurt in the first and second, and dropped in the fourth round.
Where McCumby made a critical mistake was allowing Plant to take him to the ropes, and work him over for long stretches from the fifth round. McCumby took a lot of punishment against the ropes, but it wasn’t the same once he started fighting in the second of the ring again, beginning in the seventh.
– Former WBA light Welterweight Rolando ‘Rolly’ Romero (16-2, 13 KOs) looked terrible, defeating Manuel Jaimes (16-2-1, 11 KOs) by a boring ten-round unanimous decision in a nearly unwatchable fight. Rolly spent much of the time clinching and retreating. The scores were 99-91, 99-91, and 99-91.
Rolly’s management chose well, picking Jaimes, who showed zero punching power and didn’t know how to deal with Romero’s excessive clinching throughout the ten-round fight. The referee should have penalized Rolly for the holding because it was extreme, and had an impact on the fight.
Jaimes’ management should have watched Rolly’s last fight against Isaac ‘Pitbull’ Cruz to figure out how to keep him from holding all night. Cruz was tagging Rolly with repeated short hooks while being held, eventually knocking him out last March.
If this is how Rolly Romero will be fighting from now on, he’s not going to do well because he’s very boring to watch and not worth putting in a main event.
– Former unified super bantamweight champion Stephen Fulton (22-1, 8 KOs) edged Carlos Castro (30-3, 14 KOs), winning a narrow 10-round split decision. The scores were 96-93, 95-94 for Fulton, and 95-94 for Castro.
Fulton was dropped in the fifth round by a right hand from Castro and barely made it through. In the eighth, Castrol stunned Fulton a second time with a right hand.
Fulton found a second wind in the final two rounds, finishing strong to win the ninth and tenth to seal the victory.
Despite winning, Fulton’s performance raises questions about whether his eighth-round knockout loss to Naoya Inoue in July 2023 in Tokyo, Japan, took something out of him because tonight’s fight was supposed to be a tune-up fight for him.
Fulton wasn’t supposed to be getting knocked down and hurt by a non-puncher like Castro. Needing to struggle to defeat Castro suggests that Fulton could have lingering effects from his KO loss to Inoue last year, and that’s going to crumble when he gets in with a high-level fighter at 122.
– Welterweight Ricardo Salas (20-2, 15 KOs) scored a surprising third-round knockout of the big-punching Roman Villa (26-3, 24 KOs) in a fight scheduled for ten rounds.
Villa had been dominating the contest with his hard shots in the first two rounds and looked like he was on his way to victory. However, in the third, Villa was caught with a hard right hand from Salas while unloading on him against the ropes.
Salas followed up with a left that dropped Villa hard on the canvas. Referee Mike Ortega counted out Villa. The time of the stoppage was at 2:06 of the third.
Villa’s loss was his second consecutive. In his previous fight on July 8th last year, he was knocked out in the tenth round by Jaron ‘Boots’ Ennis.
In hindsight, Villa should have boxed Salas a little more before going for the kill, but that’s how he fights. Villa is a brawler and paid the price for that style tonight.
Canelo Alvarez and Edgar Berlanga will meet tonight in the main event, live on DAZN PPV in Las Vegas, Nevada. The event starts at 8 pm ET/4 pm PT. Berlanga wants to make a name for himself by beating King Canelo and taking his spot on the throne.
