Canelo Alvarez Dog-Walked Jake Paul

Let me get out in front of this: I’m about to go full Charlie Kelly “can we talk about the mail” at the top of this column.

 

But it’s necessary to make my wider point, and a point that I somehow haven’t seen enough people make. Canelo Alvarez played Jake Paul like a fiddle last week.

 

Early last week it looked like Canelo Alvarez’s year was going to go in a very sad direction. In May, Canelo was going to fight Jake Paul on Netflix, then in September he was going to have a megafight with Terrence Crawford under the Riyadh season banner. 

 

I was so upset about it that I had a column written about how disappointing of a year that is for a fighter just a hair out of his prime and still a top-10 pound-for pound legend.

 

I wanted to talk to him like Michael talked to Connie about Merle, telling her to stop flying around the world with influencers who don’t care for him and treat him a like a whore.

 

Paul was taking victory laps in celebration of the fight that everyone who likes boxing would have hated being officially done. 

 

At 12:37pm on February 7 AEST, Mike Coppinger, who is as loud and certain as he is wrong, reported that the Paul fight was as good as done.

 

A little over an hour later The Ring Magazine which is owned by the head of Riyadh Season Turki Alashikh – the body putting on the Canelo Crawford fight – said the Crawford fight was off because of the Paul fight.

 

The year for Canelo went from bad to worse with no Crawford fight (which I don’t love) and a Jake Paul fight (which I hate with the fire of a thousand suns).

 

Two hours later, at 3:37pm Turki posted this video and follow up tweet confirming four fights for Canelo under the Riyadh Season banner including a fight with Crawford in September as originally planned.

 

At 4:20pm, Coppinger confirmed that he was wrong again and the Paul fight was off.

 

The Saudis won and are taking a victory lap.

 

What happened here?

 

In short, Canelo used Jake Paul as leverage.

 

Canelo was talking to both sides. The Saudis have not put on any of these influencer type events and don’t have any appetite for them, while Paul has been chasing Canelo for years because he’s a masochist.

 

Canelo obviously wasn’t happy with the money that the Saudis were offering him and he said “fine, I’ll go and fight Jake Paul.”

 

They replied “whatever” like a petulant teenager and tweeted out that they’re giving up on the Crawford fight, negotiating in public.

 

Canelo, like the kid whose hovering his hand over the electric fence while his mum yells “don’t touch it”, reiterated “I really will fight Jake Paul” and we get the patented Mike Coppinger premature ejaculation on a story in another public negotiation device.

 

Then, as Canelo knew they would, the Saudis realised that Canelo is the only star that hasn’t fought under the Riyadh Season banner and is the biggest star in the sport.

 

As a result, they re-entered the fold while Paul never left.

 

By this point, Canelo had created a d**k-measuring competition between two egomaniacs for his services in May.

 

The difference between them is that Turki Alashikh, with his access to the Saudi Public Investment Fund, is a John Holmes motherfu**er.

 

Jake Paul is more Porno Gil sized.

 

Canelo knew it, Jake Paul didn’t.

 

The Saudis promptly sweetened the pot for Canelo and locked up probably his last two elite years.

 

Jake Paul is left making AI slop photos and saying that Canelo ducked him, building toward their inevitble fight in 2027.

 

For some reason nobody is talking about the Canelo business masterclass.

 

Ariel Helwani actually said that it would be unfair to characterise Canelo as having used Paul, though that’s unsurprising given he’s part of the PR team for both Jake Paul and the Saudi presence in boxing.

 

Everyone seems to just be saying that he really was going to fight Jake Paul and the Saudis came in and sweetened the pot. That very well might be true. Canelo has made no bones about the fact that he’s a PRIZE fighter, and he’ll go where the money is.

 

But that’s missing the connective tissue. He knew that one side of the negotiation has access to the biggest prize in boxing, no barriers to splashing any amount of cash, and enormous motivation to send some gold in his direction.

 

He used Jake Paul as bait, Paul fell for it, and the Alvarez’s can become an old-money dynasty based on what Canelo has made for them.

 

For good measure, Canelo is now dog-walking Paul publicly like he did in private just recently.