WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez is getting ready to start his sparring for the most important fight of his 8-year pro career against Floyd Mayweather Jr. on 9/14 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
According to Fightnews, Canelo’s team has 6 potential sparring partners that the 22-year-old red-haired Canelo will pick from to find one that is similar to the 36-year-old Mayweather. Whoever they pick, it’s not going to be the same as what Canelo will be facing when he battles the real thing on September 14th.
They can find someone that sort of fights like Mayweather, but it won’t be anything like the real Mayweather. Canelo is going to need to pick a number of sparring partners because if he only selects one welterweight for him to spar, he could beat him up early and often and not get much from the sparring sessions.
With Caenlo’s huge weight and power advantage over welterweights, he’ll likely beat up the 147 pounders they bring into camp. Canelo would likely have problems of his own if they brought sparring partners that had a huge 20 pound weight advantage over him and expected him to spar with those guys every day to get ready for Mayweather.
At some point, Canelo would likely take a beating from the larger guys and it wouldn’t work out. The same goes for the lighter guys that are being brought in to face Canelo. If he weighs 170+ pounds and he’s sparring with 147 lb. sparring partners, it’s going to be difficult to keep the welterweights in the camp for long. He’s going to need a long line of Mayweather-like sparring partners for him to face on a daily basis for him to be able to get ready for this fight.
Canelo’s sparring is probably going to be useless to him anyway. He won’t spar anyone good enough to get anything from the sparring sessions and if anything, he’ll develop bad habits from the easy sparring sessions that’ll hurt him when he faces Mayweather. What Canelo should do is forget about sparring and get a treadmill and work on his poor conditioning. He’ll need that a lot more than beating up some over-matched, underweight fighter that won’t be able to give him much.