“Frazier’s got two chances – slim, and none, and slim just left town.”
That was the line Muhammad Ali delivered before his 1971 fight against Joe Frazier. It was a catchy phrase, but the promise didn’t prove to be true, as “Smokin’ Joe” dropped Ali and scored a 15-round unanimous decision win in the first fight of perhaps the greatest trilogy in boxing history.
Five decades later, slim and none are the chances the boxing world is giving undefeated upstart Edgar Berlanga (22-0, 17 KOs) to upset super middleweight king Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (61-2-2, 39 KOs) on Sept. 14. at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
Alvarez is a -1800 betting favorite, and Berlanga is a +1000 underdog, according to DraftKings.
“Canelo is overlooking me,” Berlanga told BoxingScene. “He knows that I have skills. He’s probably doubting that, too, and that I don’t hit hard. He’s 100 percent doubting my fighting IQ and experience. He thinks it’s a cakewalk for him, and that he’s just going to walk in and make $35-40 million against a younger guy. He thinks it’s a walkthrough, but he’s going to walk into a brick wall. He’s going to see something different. It is what it is. He can have that mindset, but he’s going to get fucked if he goes into the fight with that kind of mindset. He’s going to get fucked up. It’s just more fire for me to win and whoop his ass.”
Berlanga is adamant he has to outsmart Alvarez with his boxing IQ.
The statement caused a brouhaha during their promotional tour last month, as the overconfident Alvarez laughed at the thought that a fighter who’s never fought for a world title and only beaten gatekeepers would best him.
The four-division champion Alvarez has 19 years of professional experience and has racked up 496 rounds fighting the millennium’s top fighters compared to Berlanga’s 72 rounds over the last eight years.
Seeking to gain an extra edge, Berlanga moved training camp from Tampa, Florida to the high-altitude wilderness of Boulder, Colorado, taking a page of out Alvarez’s book, who last year moved camp from San Diego to a high-altitude terrain near Lake Tahoe, California.
“I could have done camp anywhere, but I needed to be out here in nature,” said Berlanga. “When God wants you to elevate in life, he isolates you. And that is why I am in isolation. I’m in the jail.
“I wanted to be trained in the wilderness at high altitudes. I’m in the woods. There are bears who visit me every morning. I like being around that. That’s the real fighter’s mentality. It’s putting me in the zone. It’s putting me in the space to be locked in.
“The most important thing in boxing is the mind. Boxing is not physical. I can grab a guy who is 250 pounds and hits like a brick wall but break him down with my mental IQ. You have to understand that IQ is everything in this sport. You have to be smart in that ring and how you’re setting up the opponent to break them down and drown them in the later rounds.
“We have the same jab, the same right hand, and the same combinations. It’s just taking the mentality to a whole new level.
“He’s gotten broken down numerous times. His code has already been cracked four times by Floyd Mayweather Jr., Erislandy Lara, the first Gennadiy Golovkin fight and by Dmitry Bivol. I’m not going in there like, ‘oh my God, I have to figure this guy out.’ It’s just about the mind and showing him that I have the IQ and experience. Everything that he says I don’t have, I’m going to show him that I have it. The people will see Sept. 14.”
Manouk Akopyan is a sports journalist, writer and broadcast reporter whose work has appeared on ESPN, Fox Sports, USA Today, The Guardian, Newsweek, Men’s Health, NFL.com, Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Ring Magazine and more. He’s been writing for BoxingScene since 2018. Manouk is a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America and the MMA Journalists Association. He can be reached on X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube, through email at manouk[dot]akopyan[at]gmail.com or via www.ManoukAkopyan.com.
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