Canelo vs GGG

For all his successes and talent, Gennadiy Golovkin is destined to be remembered as Saúl Álvarez's foil.

After the fight was delayed while Álvarez served a suspension for testing positive for clenbuterol (he blamed tainted meat he ate in Mexico and said he stopped eating beef), Golovkin called his onetime sparring partner a drug cheat. “He pretends to be a good person and be different, but he’s not.” Whether he fights Bivol next, or somebody else, it seems Álvarez’s future resides in the super middleweight and light heavyweight divisions, one more reason his struggle with Golovkin is finally over. Golovkin won most of the later rounds on the judges’ scorecards, and he has to wonder what would have happened had he begun the fight aggressively. The king of his rivalry with Golovkin certainly, finally. It was perhaps an incongruous statement coming from Álvarez, ever the showman, considering he was wearing a crown as he said it. Fight weekends are always big in Las Vegas, and this time tens of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans descended on The Strip to celebrate Mexico’s Independence Day, which was on Friday, in proximity to its favorite fighter. The judges scored the fight 116-112, 115-113 and 115-113 in favor of Álvarez, scoring that did not do Álvarez’s dominant win justice. Golovkin spent the first two-thirds of the fight weakly probing with his left jab and tagged Álvarez with damaging punches only when he abandoned caution late. Golovkin, 40, is such a fearsome puncher — he has won all of his professional fights against boxers not named Saúl Álvarez, and almost all of them by knockout — that he is regularly avoided. To be remembered as the fighter whose greatest value lay in providing a canvas for Álvarez, known as Canelo, to paint on. Golovkin, then, over the course of 24 rounds, stuck as closely to Álvarez as anybody has.