Canelo Alvarez chases the one thing he’s missing

This time last year, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez had no 168-pound title belts.

His career plans temporarily stalled by the COVID-19 pandemic, Alvarez hadn’t fought in more than a year, an extreme rarity for one of boxing’s most active champions. He’d just finalized a messy divorce with his former promoter, Golden Boy, and was suddenly a network free agent.

Yet he now sits on the precipice of boxing immortality, with an opportunity this weekend to become just the sixth male boxer to become an undisputed champion, or hold all four major belts in a weight division at the same time. Alvarez, with the World Boxing Association, World Boxing Council and World Boxing Organization belts, will face undefeated Las Vegan Caleb Plant on Saturday night at MGM Grand Garden Arena.

The bout, for Alvarez’s belts and Plant’s International Boxing Federation strap, will headline a Showtime boxing pay-per-view starting at 6 p.m.

“For me, this is nothing different,” Alvarez said this week. “Nothing changed. I trained 100 percent. I came ready to fight.”

Alvarez, boxing’s biggest star and the consensus No. 1 pound-for-pound fighter in the world, started his march to undisputed status in the super middleweight division with a win over the previously undefeated Callum Smith in December 2020.

He followed that with a stay-busy mandatory defense against overmatched Avni Yildirim in February, then literally broke Billy Joe Saunders’ face to take his WBO belt in May.

Now there’s only one belt left to grab, the IBF version held by the slick-moving Plant (21-0, 12 knockouts), who has fought an extremely low level of competition during his championship reign but is nonetheless dangerous and undefeated. Plant, for his part, doesn’t care what people think of the fight.

“I’ve been the underdog before,” he said this week. It’s a place I like to be. I like people rooting against me. It gives me extra motivation. But when you’re fighting for undisputed status, you don’t need much more motivation than that.”

Bet MGM, theoretically rooting for no one, has installed Alvarez as a minus-1000 favorite.

For Alvarez (56-1-2, 38 KOs) and so many other fighters, a fight week is often more about what’s next than the actual fight at hand. Who’s on the horizon? But this week is different, more focused on the moment and what it would mean for Alvarez to become the first Mexican undisputed champion.

“I don’t focus on the opponent,” said Eddy Reynoso, Alvarez’s longtime trainer and manager. “I focus on what my fighter will be able to do. We had an amazing camp. We’re going to be ready to roll on Saturday night.”

There’s what appears to be real animosity, too, something that’s a relative rarity for an Alvarez fight. He broke his normally stoic demeanor at the kickoff press conference, when Plant shoved him and he followed up with what can only be described as a perfect inside left hand that left Plant with a cut under his right eye.

A gash that didn’t threaten the fight, but is still noticeable on Plant’s face during fight week.

The exact cause of the beef isn’t really clear, perhaps literally lost in translation somewhere between English and Spanish. Regardless, Alvarez has vowed it won’t effect his preparation for the fight.

“In the end it’s personal, yes,” he said. “But I don’t have anything to prove to him. He’s going to feel what I have to prove.”

Contact Jonah Dylan at jdylan@reviewjournal.com. Follow @TheJonahDylan on Twitter.