We asked four questions about the fight. Before the fight, many boxing pundits thought Canelo was all hype.

Five things we learned: Canelo-Trout card

Do you believe in Canelo now? I believed in Canelo before Saturday night, albeit for a somewhat arbitrary reason. Sportswriters get in trouble these days for making facile and possibly apocryphal distinctions like these.

In retrospect, building an opinion on a fighter based on the sound of his body shots was just as silly, especially when stacked up against the more concrete things we knew about Canelo.

He does not move particularly well. He mostly staggers around in the ring, his lower lip stuck out like a petulant child. He keeps his body coiled up so that once he finds an opening, he can launch straight into his opponent with a barrage of heavy shots. It stood to reason that if Cotto could not figure out Trout, then Canelo, who, at the age of 22, still has quite a bit of learning to do in the ring, would probably get outclassed. Before the fight, the conventional wisdom went something like this: Well, both of those things happened on Saturday night.

Canelo had trouble getting off his shots and seemed gassed in the middle rounds. In the seventh round, Canelo landed a straight right hand that sent Trout reeling.

The loss of equilibrium caught up to Trout a second later — his knees buckled, he did the Bernie and went sprawling down to the canvas for the first time in his professional career. A knockout happens for all sorts of reasons, but almost never because a fighter had some reserve of power that we had never seen before.

On Saturday night, Canelo threw a hard right hand and Trout got caught leaning forward.

This was a significantly improved version of the Canelo who beat up Shane Mosley last year. His skills will never measure up to his wild popularity back home in Mexico, but by beating a legitimate light middleweight, Canelo earned his spot in pay-per-view super fights. Boxing fans often fancy themselves an embattled group. Their sport, they feel, is underappreciated and misunderstood and overlooked by the general sports audience.

Whether or not boxing is dead or dying or on life support or if it is comfortably surviving with a patchwork fan base of ethnic audiences is not what matters here it also might be the most tired discussion in sports.

What matters is the sense among those who love boxing that they must evangelize for the sport, that they have to hold up every Ward-Gatti and Corrales-Castillo and Rios-Alvarado and scream to the mainstream: And because being a boxing fan today means caring about the health of the sport, it also means being hyper-aware of the need for crossover stars who can sell pay-per-view events and fill Las Vegas arenas and represent boxing on the two or three nights a year when the mass sports audience actually pays attention.

Last night, after years of padding his record against B-list fighters and long-since-shot former champions, Canelo lived up to the hype by defeating Trout, one of the top three junior middleweights in the world. To me, Canelo is the Biebs of boxing — a true talent whose success feels wholly canned and manufactured. He showed Saturday night that he has it in him to defeat world-class fighters.

He was given cream-puff opponents and star status and a championship belt based on his pretty mug and uncommon hair color, and in his 43rd fight, he finally did something to earn it. Stanley Christodoulou scored it for Canelo. Oren Shellenberger scored it for Canelo and Rey Danseco scored it for Canelo.

Everyone else seemed to have watched a very closely contested bout. What the hell were the official judges watching? I had it for Canelo, but I certainly understand those who had Trout ahead by one or two points. Was there a world in which Canelo won eight of 12 rounds?

I went back on Sunday morning and rewatched the fight and ended up giving Canelo one more round than I had before, for a victory. For those wanting a more extensive look into the scoring, Bad Left Hook did a great job breaking down the fight round-by-round. As for the open scoring system that reveals the official scorecards to both fighters, let me just say this: There is no rationale for keeping a system that robs everyone involved of the heightened drama of the championship rounds.

Get rid of the system now. Bill Simmons on which NFL teams will claim the up-for grabs playoff spots. Features The Triangle The Hollywood Prospectus Contributors Podcasts Video Quarterly ESPN.

Four Questions About Canelo Alvarez vs. Austin Trout «

Four Questions About Canelo Alvarez vs. If you care about boxing, do you have to root for Canelo? In the grand scheme of Texas boxing travesties, was this score actually not half-bad?

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