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The Roles Have Changed for Caleb Plant Who Isn’t Intimidated by Canelo Alvarez

The Roles Have Changed for Caleb Plant Who Isn’t Intimidated by Canelo Alvarez
It seems highly unlikely, almost impossible even, for anyone to see certain parallels between Canelo Alvarez, widely considered to be the finest pound-for-pound boxer in the world, and Mike Lee, described by one veteran observer as a “glorified club fighter” who rose faster and higher than his skill level suggested because of an unusual background that for a time made him something of a media darling.
Not that he has said it in so many words, but it does seem possible that Caleb “Sweet Hands” Plant (21-0, 12KOs), who takes on the heavily favored Alvarez (56-1-2, 38 KOs) for the undisputed super middleweight championship of the world Saturday night at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand, and who brutally dismissed Lee in an IBF title bout nearly 28 months ago, will draw from the same motivational bubbling well of dislike to achieve the desired result. The only difference is that this time, it is Plant who will be cast in the role of would-be usurper Lee. In some people’s eyes, anyway.
Alvarez’s WBC, WBO, WBA (super) 168-pound belts will be on the line in the PBC on Showtime Pay Per View telecast, as well as Plant’s IBF strap.
Plant, a 29-year-old native of the small town of Ashland, Tenn., who now resides in Las Vegas, considers himself the best super middleweight fighter on the planet, but it is an assertion that can’t and won’t be verified until the 10-to-1 longshot does what no one other than the great Floyd Mayweather Jr. has been able to do, which is to hang a defeat on the hugely popular Mexican national hero. Becoming the first man to hold all four belts in his weight class from the most widely recognized sanctioning bodies should be ample enough reason for both parties to put forth their best effort on fight night, but Plant, not surprisingly, had been nursing a spark of resentment that he has since fanned into a raging bonfire.
It began when negotiations to stage the fight on its originally proposed date, Sept. 18, broke down over contractual issues. Alvarez then seemed set on arranging a fight with WBA (super) light heavyweight champ Dmitry Bivol, but that, too, was scrapped and the Alvarez camp circled back toward Plant. But while an accord was finally reached, hard feelings on both sides had intensified, with Plant and his support crew accusing Canelo and his handlers of not only being difficult at the bargaining table, but of downplaying a history of cheating, a reference to Alvarez having served a six-month suspension in 2018 for testing positive for clenbuterol, a banned substance.
Of the protracted wrangling, Plant said, “We tried to sit down with them. They told me what I would get paid, the opportunity that I had in front of me and I said, `Yeah.’ There wasn’t much haggle room on my end. The opportunity was presented to me, I took it, I wanted it. But they came back asking for even more. I can’t speak for their side for why things fell apart, but it had nothing to do with me. My side had been signed for weeks. When it fell apart, I just tried to be focused on the only thing that I could be in control of, which is making sure I was staying in the gym and doing what I was supposed to be doing. That way, if they came back around or not, I’d still be ready to fight whomever.”
And the charge of being a PEDs abuser Plant leveled at Canelo?
“I haven’t made any false allegations,” Plant said. “Everything I’ve said is factual. Whether he likes it or not, the facts are the facts. Maybe that’s what’s gotten under his skin, because he knows it’s true.”
The potential for some sort of premature skirmish was realized at a Sept. 21 press conference when Alvarez and Plan got nose-to-nose for the obligatory photo-op staredown, which resulted in a brief scuffle which Alvarez initiated with a hard shove to Plant’s chest. Plant came away with a cut below his right eye.
“This is new for me,” Canelo, who in most instances pays at least complimentary lip service to the guy he is about to fight, said later. “I’ve never had as much bad blood with an opponent as this one. Yes, this is the most animosity that I’ve had heading into a big prizefight.”
Ring announcer Jimmy Lennon Jr., who had an up-close-and-personal view of what went down, told me “It does seem that things can get out of hand more now at press conferences and weigh-ins. Staredowns, even intense ones, don’t have to lead to physical confrontations. I’m always pleased when the fighters shake hands and hug after the photos are taken. Boxing is a sport and you’re not supposed to let your focus or emotions out of control then.
“There’s so much of this now. And let’s be honest; it does sell tickets if something outlandish takes place. With Canelo and Plant, ticket sales definitely went up after that happened. But I don’t feel that was forced or staged. There was a lot of tension going on then, words were exchanged and it just got out of hand. So, yeah, it sure felt real.”
Not that the lead-up to Plant-Lee prior to their July 20, 2019, bout, the first defense of the IBF belt Plant had won on a 12-round unanimous decision over Venezuela’s Jose Uzcategui six months earlier, was any less confrontational on the part of the obviously miffed champion. To Plant’s way of thinking, Lee was a manufactured contender who, after logging 21 victorious bouts as a light heavyweight against middling opposition, was awarded a title shot in his first pro outing as a super middle because he was portrayed as unique because of factors that had little or nothing to do with the difficult road trod by most up-by-their-bootstraps fighters. An all-conference linebacker at his parochial high school, Lee began his college career at the University of Missouri before transferring to Notre Dame as a sophomore. While there, he won three consecutive Bengal Bouts intramural championships in addition to graduating with a 3.8 grade-point average in business. He reportedly had job offers from Wall Street which he put on hold to try his hand at boxing, in which he must have seemed like a wayward adventurer temporarily traipsing through a rough trade largely populated by rough customers like Plant.
The media, of course, was quickly drawn to the improbable tale of the personable, well-educated son of privilege who had spent part of his senior year at Notre Dame in Bangladesh, where he taught English and mathematics in addition to raising more than $100,000 that went toward the building of schools and health-care facilities in the Third-World country.
If anything could transform Lee into a prepackaged star upon his return to the U.S., it was the always-whirling Top Rank hype machine. After signing with TR founder Bob Arum, Lee compiled an 11-0 record before his contract expired, but even then he continued to remain firmly in the public eye as the result of his being one of several sports-world endorsers of the Subway sandwich-shop chain, a group that then included, among others, NFL stars Michael Strahan, Ndamukong Suh and fellow Notre Dame alum Justin Tuck, Olympic swimming gold medalist Michael Stewart, baseball slugger Ryan Howard, NBA standout Tony Parker and NASCAR driver Tony Stewart. He even was featured in a Subway ad that was seen by tens of millions of television viewers during Super Bowl Sunday in 2013.
In comparison to Subway’s other lineup of star pitchmen, Lee, who to that point had accomplished little of note, must have seemed famous mostly for being famous. In short order grumblers, Plant among them, intimidated that Lee had come onto the scene from Notre Dame’s Golden Dome with a silver spoon of caviar stuck in his mouth. The prevailing opinion was that boxing was his hobby, not his vocation, and he would step away from it whenever he decided it finally was time for him to take advantage of his degree, put on expensively tailored suits and head to work every morning carrying an expensive leather briefcase rather than a gym bag.
For his part, Lee tried to depict himself as much the same as other fighters. Yeah, his family had become well-off in monetary terms, but it had not always been so. And he said his paved and seemingly obstacle-free path to success had been marked by years of debilitating pain. His progress in boxing, he noted, was dramatically slowed when he began suffering constant back and joint pain. Eventually he was diagnosed with an auto-immune disease known as ankylosing spondylitis.
“I was told that I would never box again,” Lee said. “That really infuriated me because every time someone tells me I can’t do something, I want to do it twice. Doctors are smart and know what they are doing. I knew, though, that they didn’t know what I had in my heart and I was a different human being. I told them they were wrong, and I would figure it out and get back in the ring.”
Eighteen months later, in April 2014, Lee stopped Peter Lewis in six rounds, the start of a 10-fight win streak that got him his shot at Plant.
At the final prefight press conference, Plant listened to Lee’s tales of being an everyman who had had endured much in pursuing his boxing dream, and then it was the champion’s turn to speak. He immediately made it clear that he was not impressed by anything he had heard. Plant was dedicating the Lee fight to the memory of his late daughter, Alia, who died at 19 months old of an unknown illness which caused seizures, as well as to his mother, Beth Plant, who was shot and killed by a police officer for allegedly brandishing a knife in March 2019. Basically, he was saying, `OK, you just put your headaches and various aches and pain into the pot, so now I’m raising you two deaths in my immediate family.’
“You may have a financial degree, but in boxing I have a Ph.D.,” Plant, addressing Lee, said at the final press conference. “And that’s something you don’t know anything about.
“I’ve been doing this for 18 years straight – no breaks, no distractions and no Plan B. I commend you for doing this, but there’s no college degree for me. No high school sports, no acting gigs, no Subway commercials. Just boxing day in, day out, rain, sleet or snow.”
The fight, what there was of it, went as most had expected. Plant floored the overmatched Lee three times officially (four if you include another trip to the canvas perhaps incorrectly ruled a slip by referee Robert Byrd), the last knockdown convincing Byrd there was no need to proceed further. The end came after an elapsed time of one minute, 29 seconds into round three.
Mike Lee has not fought since.
So now Caleb Plant, the honest workman, is back at the same old stand, except that the guy in the other corner on Saturday night is so much more like him than Lee had been. Canelo Alvarez, now 31, turned pro at 15 and also came up the hard way, beating grown men with boundless talent and determination. Maybe he wasn’t always this dominant, but he had the potential to be so, and he would someday fulfill his destiny because boxing is not and never has been a hobby for him. He is who and what he is because he took his considerable skills and honed them to a razor’s edge, which he is again intent on displaying against someone with a like mindset.
“The media’s job is to make (Canelo) seem unbeatable,” Plant said. “That’s what they’re doing. But anyone who knows boxing and has seen him in with some of these high-level fighters – I’m talking about Triple G (Gennadiy Golovikin), I’m talking about (Erislandy) Lara, even Austin Trout – know he was beatable in those fights. There are things those guys were able to capitalize on, and I feel I possess a lot of those same skills, except I’m a full-fledged super middleweight. I’m not a 154-pounder, I’m not a middleweight. I’ve been fighting at this weight for a really long time. There are things I feel like – I know – I can capitalize on. On Nov. 6, that’s what I plan on doing.”
Asked for his final thoughts on Mike Lee, Plant said it’s not enough to have the benefit of good publicity. No spin doctor can help anyone inside the ropes, where truth is always there to be seen for what it is. “Not only was the media building him up, he was building himself up,” Plant opined. “I wanted to show him he wasn’t the real deal, that I’m the real deal. But that’s not just for him; it goes for any fighter that gets in there with me. I feel that way against anybody that’s in front of me. When the bell rings, all the talk stops. Who’s going to impose his will on the other man?
“I plan on imposing my will on Canelo and becoming the undisputed super middleweight champion.”
Editor’s Note: Bernard Fernandez, named to the International Boxing Hall of Fame in the Observer category with the class of 2020, was the recipient of numerous awards for writing excellence during his 28-year career as a sportswriter for the Philadelphia Daily News. Fernandez’s first book, “Championship Rounds,” a compendium of previously published material, was released in May of last year. The sequel, “Championship Rounds, Vol. 2,” with a foreword by Jim Lampley, arrives this fall. The book, published in paperback, can be ordered through Amazon.com and other book-selling websites and outlets.
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Avila Perspective, Chap. 322: Super Welter Week in SoCal

Two below-the-radar super welterweight stars show off their skills this weekend from different parts of Southern California.
One in particular, Charles Conwell, co-headlines a show in Oceanside against a hard-hitting Mexican while another super welter star Sadriddin Akhmedov faces another Mexican hitter in Commerce.
Take your pick.
The super welterweight division is loaded with talent at the moment. If Terence Crawford remained in the division he would be at the top of the class, but he is moving up several weight divisions.
Conwell (21-0, 16 KOs) faces Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 KOs) a tall knockout puncher from Los Mochis at the Frontwave Arena in Oceanside, Calif. on Saturday April 19. DAZN will stream the Golden Boy Promotions card that also features undisputed flyweight champion Gabriela Fundora. We’ll get to her later.
Conwell might be the best super welterweight out there aside from the big dogs like Vergil Ortiz, Serhii Bohachuk and Sebastian Fundora.
If you are not familiar with Conwell he comes from Cleveland, Ohio and is one of those fighters that other fighters know about. He is good.
He has the James “Lights Out” Toney kind of in-your-face-style where he anchors down and slowly deciphers the opponent’s tools and then takes them away piece by piece. Usually it’s systematic destruction. The kind you see when a skyscraper goes down floor by floor until it’s smoking rubble.
During the Covid days Conwell fought two highly touted undefeated super welters in Wendy Toussaint and Madiyar Ashkeyev. He stopped them both and suddenly was the boogie man of the super welterweight division.
Conwell will be facing Mexico’s taller Garcia who likes to trade blows as most Mexican fighters prefer, especially those from Sinaloa. These guys will be firing H bombs early.
Fundora
Co-headlining the Golden Boy card is Gabriela Fundora (15-0, 7 KOs) the undisputed flyweight champion of the world. She has all the belts and Mexico’s Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1, 3 KOs) wants them.
Gabriela Fundora is the sister of Sebastian Fundora who holds the men’s WBC and WBO super welterweight world titles. Both are tall southpaws with power in each hand to protect the belts they accumulated.
Six months ago, Fundora met Argentina’s Gabriela Alaniz in Las Vegas to determine the undisputed flyweight champion. The much shorter Alaniz tried valiantly to scrap with Fundora and ran into a couple of rocket left hands.
Mexico’s Badillo is an undefeated flyweight from Mexico City who has battled against fellow Mexicans for years. She has fought one world champion in Asley Gonzalez the current super flyweight world titlist. They met years ago with Badillo coming out on top.
Does Badillo have the skill to deal with the taller and hard-hitting Fundora?
When a fighter has a six-inch height advantage like Fundora, it is almost impossible to out-maneuver especially in two-minute rounds. Ask Alaniz who was nearly decapitated when she tried.
This will be Badillo’s first pro fight outside of Mexico.
Commerce Casino
Kazakhstan’s Sadriddin Akhmedov (15-0, 13 KOs) is another dangerous punching super welterweight headlining a 360 Promotions card against Mexico’s Elias Espadas (23-6, 16 KOs) on Saturday at the Commerce Casino.
UFC Fight Pass will stream the 360 Promotions card of about eight bouts.
Akhmedov is another Kazakh puncher similar to the great Gennady “GGG” Golovkin who terrorized the middleweight division for a decade. He doesn’t have the same polish or dexterity but doesn’t lack pure punching power.
It’s another test for the super welterweight who is looking to move up the ladder in the very crowded 154-pound weight division. 360 Promotions already has a top contender in Ukraine’s Serhii Bohachuk who nearly defeated Vergil Ortiz a year ago.
Could Bohachuk and Akhmedov fight each other if nothing else materializes?
That’s a question for another day.
Fights to Watch
Sat. DAZN 5 p.m. Charles Conwell (21-0, 16 KOs) vs. Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 KOs); Gabriela Fundora (15-0) vs Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1).
Sat. UFC Fight Pass 6 p.m. Sadriddin Akhmedov (15-0) vs Elias Espadas (23-6).
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TSS Salutes Thomas Hauser and his Bernie Award Cohorts

The Boxing Writers Association of America has announced the winners of its annual Bernie Awards competition. The awards, named in honor of former five-time BWAA president and frequent TSS contributor Bernard Fernandez, recognize outstanding writing in six categories as represented by stories published the previous year.
Over the years, this venerable website has produced a host of Bernie Award winners. In 2024, Thomas Hauser kept the tradition alive. A story by Hauser that appeared in these pages finished first in the category “Boxing News Story.” Titled “Ryan Garcia and the New York State Athletic Commission,” the story was published on June 23. You can read it HERE.
Hauser also finished first in the category of “Investigative Reporting” for “The Death of Ardi Ndembo,” a story that ran in the (London) Guardian. (Note: Hauser has owned this category. This is his 11th first place finish for “Investigative Reporting”.)
Thomas Hauser, who entered the International Boxing Hall of Fame with the class of 2019, was honored at last year’s BWAA awards dinner with the A.J. Leibling Award for Outstanding Boxing Writing. The list of previous winners includes such noted authors as W.C. Heinz, Budd Schulberg, Pete Hamill, and George Plimpton, to name just a few.
The Leibling Award is now issued intermittently. The most recent honorees prior to Hauser were Joyce Carol Oates (2015) and Randy Roberts (2019).
Roberts, a Distinguished Professor of History at Purdue University, was tabbed to write the Hauser/Leibling Award story for the glossy magazine for BWAA members published in conjunction with the organization’s annual banquet. Regarding Hauser’s most well-known book, his Muhammad Ali biography, Roberts wrote, “It is nearly impossible to overestimate the importance of the book to our understanding of Ali and his times.” An earlier book by Hauser, “The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing,” garnered this accolade: “Anyone who wants to understand boxing today should begin by reading ‘The Black Lights’.”
A panel of six judges determined the Bernie Award winners for stories published in 2024. The stories they evaluated were stripped of their bylines and other identifying marks including the publication or website for which the story was written.
Other winners:
Boxing Event Coverage: Tris Dixon
Boxing Column: Kieran Mulvaney
Boxing Feature (Over 1,500 Words): Lance Pugmire
Boxing Feature (Under 1,500 Words): Chris Mannix
The Dixon, Mulvaney, and Pugmire stories appeared in Boxing Scene; the Mannix story in Sports Illustrated.
The Bernie Award recipients will be honored at the forthcoming BWAA dinner on April 30 at the Edison Ballroom in the heart of Times Square. (For more information, visit the BWAA website). Two days after the dinner, an historic boxing tripleheader will be held in Times Square, the logistics of which should be quite interesting. Ryan Garcia, Devin Haney, and Teofimo Lopez share top billing.
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Mekhrubon Sanginov, whose Heroism Nearly Proved Fatal, Returns on Saturday

To say that Mekhrubon Sanginov is excited to resume his boxing career would be a great understatement. Sanginov, ranked #9 by the WBA at 154 pounds before his hiatus, last fought on July 8, 2022.
He was in great form before his extended leave, having scored four straight fast knockouts, advancing his record to 13-0-1. Had he remained in Las Vegas, where he had settled after his fifth pro fight, his career may have continued on an upward trajectory, but a trip to his hometown of Dushanbe, Tajikistan, turned everything haywire. A run-in with a knife-wielding bully nearly cost him his life, stalling his career for nearly three full years.
Sanginov was exiting a restaurant in Dushanbe when he saw a man, plainly intoxicated, harassing another man, an innocent bystander. Mekhrubon intervened and was stabbed several times with a long knife. One of the puncture wounds came perilously close to puncturing his heart.
“After he stabbed me, I ran after him and hit him and caught him to hold for the police,” recollects Sanginov. “There was a lot of confusion when the police arrived. At first, the police were not certain what had happened.
“By the time I got to the hospital, I had lost two liters of blood, or so I was told. After I was patched up, one of the surgeons said to me, ‘Give thanks to God because he gave you a second life.’ It is like I was born a second time.”
“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have happened in any city,” he adds. (A story about the incident on another boxing site elicited this comment from a reader: “Good man right there. World would be a better place if more folk were willing to step up when it counts.”)
Sanginov first laced on a pair of gloves at age 10 and was purportedly 105-14 as an amateur. Growing up, the boxer he most admired was Roberto Duran. “Muhammad Ali will always be the greatest and [Marvin] Hagler was great too, but Duran was always my favorite,” he says.
During his absence from the ring, Sanginov married a girl from Tajikistan and became a father. His son Makhmud was born in Las Vegas and has dual citizenship. “Ideally,” he says, “I would like to have three more children. Two more boys and the last one a daughter.”
He also put on a great deal of weight. When he returned to the gym, his trainer Bones Adams was looking at a cruiserweight. But gradually the weight came off – “I had to give up one of my hobbies; I love to eat,” he says – and he will be resuming his career at 154. “Although I am the same weight as before, I feel stronger now. Before I was more of a boy, now I am a full-grown man,” says Sanginov who turned 29 in February.
He has a lot of rust to shed. Because of all those early knockouts, he has answered the bell for only eight rounds in the last four years. Concordantly, his comeback fight on Saturday could be described as a soft re-awakening. Sanginov’s opponent Mahonri Montes, an 18-year pro from Mexico, has a decent record (36-10-2, 25 KOs) but has been relatively inactive and is only 1-3-1 in his last five. Their match at Thunder Studios in Long Beach, California, is slated for eight rounds.
On May 10, Ardreal Holmes (17-0) faces Erickson Lubin (26-2) on a ProBox card in Kissimmee, Florida. It’s an IBF super welterweight title eliminator, meaning that the winner (in theory) will proceed directly to a world title fight.
Sanginov will be watching closely. He and Holmes were scheduled to meet in March of 2022 in the main event of a ShoBox card on Showtime. That match fell out when Sanginov suffered an ankle injury in sparring.
If not for a twist of fate, that may have been Mekhrubon Sanginov in that IBF eliminator, rather than Ardreal Holmes. We will never know, but one thing we do know is that Mekhrubon’s world title aspirations were too strong to be ruined by a knife-wielding bully.
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