MORNING KOMBAT WITH LUKE THOMAS AND BRIAN CAMPBELL - 🚨 Instant Analysis: Canelo Alvarez dominates Callum Smith

Episode Date: December 20, 2020

Brian Campbell provides instant reaction following Canelo Alvarez’s unanimous decision over unbeaten Callum Smith on Saturday to unify a pair of super middleweight world titles. BC ponders whether this secures Alvarez’s claim, without argument, to being the pound-for-pound best in the sport and marvels at how well-rounded his approach was in dominating Smith. --------------------------------- 'Morning Kombat’ is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Bullhorn and wherever else you listen to podcasts.    For more Combat Sports coverage subscribe here: youtube.com/MorningKombat   Follow our hosts on Twitter: @BCampbellCBS, @lthomasnews, @MorningKombat    For Morning Kombat gear visit: store.sho.com   Follow our hosts on Instagram: @BrianCampbell, @lukethomasnews, @MorningKombat  To hear more from the CBS Sports Podcast Network, visit https://www.cbssports.com/podcasts/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's in the books. It's Canelo Alvarez, a unanimous decision over Callum Smith on Saturday night in San Antonio to capture a pair of super middleweight world titles. My name is Brian Campbell, BC, the big beige one, all those good names. One half of your morning combat tri-weekly duo along with Luke Thomas. But this is instant analysis edition on all things Canelo Smith. So buckle up. It's after midnight.

We let it all hang out. BC's burnt to a crisp, but ready to deliver right now. Let's do it. Like the video. And of course, subscribe because MK hammering you out right now with a boxing MMA interviews, analysis, all that good stuff. So you know where we're at here. Let's put our heads together back inside the Alamo Dome here. Look, there's a great quote. I quote Larry Merchant a lot because he's the best to ever do it as a boxing color commentary analyst. And you know what he said about Manny Pacquiao after he shocked the world by stopping Miguel Cotto to win the welterweight world title? He said, Manny Pacquiao is great. We knew that coming in. He's better than we thought he was and that's really the best thing I can say right now about this fight Canelo Alvarez was the pound

for pound king coming in he was your recognized middleweight champion he had won a belt at 175 last year before uh punting that away and vacating it. He was already the best in the world, yet somehow in really his first real test at super middleweight against the unbeaten WBA champion Callum Smith, the recognized sort of number one guy at the moment in that division, Canelo was even better than we thought he was. This was an absolutely dominant performance from start to finish. You want to call it boring? Fine, go ahead. I was enthralled just from the absolute mastery of what Canelo was able to do. Seven-inch height disadvantage. And Kellum Smith, I mean, let's give him credit on paper. He's decently quick. He's got good power. Not great, but good power. We've seen him knock out

George Groves, Hasan Endam. I mean, he can put some punches together. And Canelo needed, what, two rounds to figure him out? Walked through him like a knife through butter. Got inside at will. And Cal Smith spent basically the entire fight with his back against the ropes, which is absolutely the worst spot you want to be against a hard puncher who's smaller than you, has a speed advantage, is more accurate than you. And as we sort of found out as this fight went on, it's just leap years ahead in terms of ring IQ and really, you know, ahead of almost anyone he gets in the ring with. And Canelo

Alvarez already has a great resume. I give him credit for always daring to be great for the most part. And this was a little bit of a dare to be great one. He was a heavy betting favorite Canelo against Calvin Smith, as he should have been. But again, he's taking on a bigger man, a guy who was unbeaten, a tough customer and Canelo, he pissed all over him.

I mean, that's like straight up. He, he made Calvin Smith look like Rocky fielding. And while he didn't get him out of there, although he had him hurt multiple times and toward the tail end of that fight, I predicted an 11th round TKO it looked like it would happen but let's at least give

Smith credit for toughing it out even though he had seemed to uh blow up his left arm there and just was not in the fight uh this was all Canelo and his ability to have such a mastery of footwork speed to be able to carry his power up and weight like this. I mean, look at this. We call people pound-for-pound greats when we try to compare their skill, right? Okay, a featherweight's never going to fight a middleweight, but we can compare them in this mythical sort of ranking of who's the best in the world. But there's a literal sense of pound-for-pound. Canelo, each weight class he goes to, whether it's middleweight, junior middleweight, light heavyweight, super middleweight tonight, he's the same fighter. And the fact that at 168 and 175 through now three fights, he's proving that he can walk down these bigger guys with

ease and be the bigger man, fight like the bigger man is really what I'm trying to say, and be the bigger puncher. I mean, he was in there against Sergey Kovalev in 2019, who's one of this era's best punchers and knockout guys, yet he completely dissuaded Kovalev from ever throwing his money punch, that right cross, because the speed and the accuracy on Canelo's combos, I'm sorry, on his counter shots was so great that even Kovalev knew, I'm going to get knocked out early. I'm going to get caught with something clean because this middleweight, Canelo, when he moves up, he's got the full package. Everything's there. And because of the speed, the accuracy, and how built he is, how strong,

he's able to land powerful shots. He was the bully in this fight. He was the puncher. But he was also the boxer when he needed to. So he's backing up Callum Smith ater, but he was also the boxer when he needed to. So he's backing up Callum Smith at will, and he's going to the body, and he's splitting the guard with right hands, and he completely took away Callum Smith's jab. So when we talk about the scouting report here, Callum Smith, seven-inch height advantage, right? Ridiculous reach advantage. The jab was going to be key to keep Canelo away and keep him from getting inside.

Absolutely, all right? Obvious. Taller fighter, you got a jab. You got to keep him away. But I was arguing that the right hand was going to be just as important because if he did not gain Canelo's respect early on, it was going to be a long night for him. I never expected it to be this easy. I expected Calvin Smith to kind of split the first six rounds, be in the fight, work his jab, look to set up and look, he's a little bit, he's not a stiff. He looked like a stiff on this night, straight up. Sorry, Callum Smith. Canelo made him look like a stiff.

Floyd made Canelo look like a stiff in 2013. Okay, it happens. There's levels to this. Canelo just so happens now to be at this super level where he made Callum look like a stiff, even though Callum can do some things. He's got good combination punching. He's got good uppercuts.

He can do that. He wasn't able to get any of that off. Canelo not only swallowed it up, but his upper half movement has always been great. Look back at the Lara and Trout fights, how Canelo, who does not have great foot speed, can certainly pivot and swivel and just avoid shots. His ability to roll with the punches here against Callum Smith was incredible. And he almost didn't need to use it because early on the first half of the fight, I was very disappointed in Callum Smith. I get why he was as passive as he was, but I felt like that right hand, I was arguing how important it was supposed to be. If he wasn't

going to be able to land it in the first half of this fight, he's going to have no chance to win. You got to hurt Canelo. You got to give, like Gennady Golovkin did, right? You've got to keep him away and give him reason not to walk you down. Gennady did it with that very hard jab and the good accuracy, and even with that, in their second fight, Canelo rallied and walked him down, and that's why we had that great finish to that fight. Calvin Smith had really no chance in this area. And his ability to not be able to overcome the speed was one thing.

But Canelo warped his mind. Canelo completely disarmed him. And that's where it was disappointing. Callum was never willing to risk it all and risk a knockout loss in order to have a chance to hurt Canelo and try to knock him out. And I can sit here and rip him and call it a, you know, a flaw and all that. But having seen the Kovalev fight, having seen Canelo fight for years, I know what happened.

I know what he can do. And you saw what happened when you matched together Canelo's speed and IQ and technique and footwork and balance and all that with Callum's. It was two different fighters in there. And this is a testament to who Canelo has become. He's only 30 years old, and he's already got a killer Hall of Fame resume. This is already his era, right? Mayweather Pacquiao took the baton from Oscar. It's now the Canelo era. It's been the Canelo era. And the fact that he's only 30 and only getting better is a true

testament to who he is. Like a young Manny Pacquiao, Canelo turned pro at some, you know, 15 or 16 years old, whatever, some stupid young age. And yet is one of these special all-time creatures who, you know, has warded off any of the damage that slows people down, is an incredibly hard worker, can rise up and down and wait and still be the same guy, and can show you that he seems to be on his way to some incredible longevity that Canelo, I'm sorry, that Manny is still operating under and Floyd also as a boxing lifer. I mean, this is a special guy.

And believe me, many times along the way, whether we're talking about the looks, thinking he's just some matinee idol, not a real fighter, or we're talking about the matchmaking, because there was a little bit of points, right? He waited out Triple G originally a couple years. There was points where you can pick at it. But overall, I mean, even the tainted beef slip up.

Canelo may have a couple slips here and there, but he's overcompensated and covered them up by being what the fighter of an era should be. And I'm not some Canelo superfan. I've, you know, picked against him and been upset a little bit about him getting the benefit of the doubt in close fights. I scored the trout fight against them, which not a ton of people did. I scored the Lara fight against them. I scored both triple G fights against him. Yet. I do also get aside from being a superstar,

why Canelo does get the advantage on to certain judges. He lands convincing, hard, clean shots. He's very efficient. And as you saw tonight, he can completely take over and dominate a fight. And going to that finish, he was still looking for a knockout in the 12th round. What more could you want out of this guy? It's incredible who he has become at 168, where he retains the speed and elusiveness of junior middleweight and middleweight,

yet it's just so much larger. At junior middleweight, at 154, you know, he could have problems with a guy like Lara who is quicker and more technical than him. But that gap now at 68 between him and the bigger men, and as we saw against him and Kovalev, for example, he's way too quick. Normally when somebody moves up to a high weight class like this, they may have that quickness and that technical advantage, but what they lose is the power difference. The fact that Canelo's able to carry this power up and that he's taken his small frame and just bulked that thing out and his neck muscles are bulging. a complete specimen. And this is his time. And no, Calum Smith will not go down as the most

difficult challenge on his resume. But it could have been a sneaky challenge. It could have been a close one that went to the cards. He could have been in a little bit of a firefight. None of that happened. None of that even remotely close happened. How dominant was this? You want to check out the CompuBox numbers with me super quick? I don't think they got enough of a trumpet playing on the broadcast. This one had a rough broadcast. Let's be straight up with this, okay? Brian Kenney had a rough night arguing with a lot of people that Chris Manick's Demetrius Andrade portion after

the fight was just mind-blowing in its ridiculousness. But let's give Canelo credit. He outlanded Smith 209 to 97 in landed punches. He landed 43% of his punches overall, which is ridiculous. He landed 57% of his power shots. He's incredible. I think a performance like this

really shows you that he truly is the palm for palm king. Respect to the monster, Naoya Inoue out of Japan. respect to Crawford and Spence. They're in that discussion too. Lomachenko fell out of that discussion. We love the guys like Usyk and Teofimo and Pacquiao who are in the second half of that top 10 pound for pound, but Pineda showed you what he's got there. He showed you the goods and the fact that he wants to continue to push now as a promotional and network free agent and just keep adding belts saying, what was he said? We're coming for more. He said that multiple times in the interview afterwards.

I want to see how far he can go. And I don't think we need a third Triple G fight. We're going to get into that a lot more on Morning Combat on Monday because Triple G fought the night before. But, you know, I'd love to see him against a lot of guys who either have belts right now at 168 or have had belts. And got a couple surprises who I want to see him against too, but I'll save that for MK on Monday. For now, let's just put the bow on this fight. It's just another time to stop and sort of look at what he has accomplished. In this fight, dominant. Overall, Canelo has one loss. There's caveats there because he got humbled by Floyd. He was 23.

He came in with an awful game plan. He deserved to lose that, but he learned a lot from it. Does he have other losses? I think I've seen it before. I mean, the Lara and Trout ones are flip a coin in my mind. The second Triple G fight was very close. First one, I thought he lost, but even if he had lost that one and avenged it in the rematch, um, I never thought he would be this good when you look back at different stops,

right? He was the, like a golden boy type guy in the beginning under Oscar when he's fighting Kodo's brother and Shane Mosley. I never thought that Canelo would, uh, would be able to be the complete package. Because don't forget there was that point where he was almost getting criticized by the true Mexican fans in his junior middleweight title run because he wasn't Chavez. You know, he didn't walk you down.

He was more of a thinking man, more of a Marquez. Now, Marquez, especially at 135 and above, became a killer. But he was a crafty counter puncher and for him to put the whole package together the way he has and to be able to package all of these wins where it's the wow the Lars the Trouts Miguel Cotto Golovkin uh I mean like it it's it's pretty special so I hope he gets uh I hope he gets what he deserves in terms of the respect. He certainly has the money. He certainly has – you know, he's operating the right way. He's being the guy at this point that you want as the face of the sport.

So, yeah, I'm babbling because I'm humbled. It was a great win for Canelo on this night. I don't think he's going to fight at 160 again. I think he made that comment in the post-fight interview afterwards that it's fun to not kill yourself and cut down the weight and for him to be able to have that ability to be this great at super middleweight. And it's not easy from here. There are some fights, you know, Caleb Plant's got some quick hands.

I want to see that. Benavides, David Benavides throws punches and bunches. He's a big dude. I want to see that. But I thought Callum Smith would have provided something more. And, you know, I took a little bit of a shot at Callum Smith. But overall, Canelo made him do that. Canelo made him dance his dance, the dance he wanted to.

And for a former junior middleweight champion to go all the way up to 68 here and be the bigger man and walk these guys down, unless he, unless he pisses motor oil, right? Unless, unless he's just a full on taking the designer cream and clear. We're looking at something special, a man for all seasons, big red. So shout out to Canelo Alvarez. That's it for this instant analysis reaction of brilliant performance from Big Red. Be sure to like the video, subscribe overall, because did you see the interviews we had lately? I mean, are you kidding me? Do you see the ones

we're coming next? What other show is going to do that at the highest level across boxing and MMA? And I know even for your MMA hardcores, get this boxing crap off my MK. I think you like it too. Okay. We've got some special interview styles, whether it's my style, whether it's Luke's style. We do a couple special things in this show. So thank you. Happy holidays to all of you. Hope you're all safe and warm and doing well. BC signing off for now, okay?

That's it. That's it. Maybe I'll leave this on. But that's all I got for today, okay? We'll see you on Monday morning. I think I got something else for you. Oh, two words. We out.