On the evening of September 15, a big professional boxing event will take place in Las Vegas, dedicated to Mexican Independence Day. The main event of the tournament will be a super middleweight fight between Saul Alvarez and Edgar Berlanga.
Canelo has been heavily criticized lately for lowering the level of opposition. Fights with John Ryder, Jaime Munguia and Jermell Charlo, who competes two weight classes below, left a taste, but Saul doesn’t care about such things. He doesn’t care about criticism and his popularity is such that even fights with opponents who are not the most famous bring him big paychecks. Alvarez’s new unknown opponent will be the undefeated American of Puerto Rican origin Edgar Berlanga.
Many have already written him off, but he has apparently already achieved what his last rivals could not. Edgar infuriated his star opponent with his aggressive trash talk and Bernard Hopkins, for example, believes that Berlanga has signed his own death warrant with this: “Canelo will knock him out in six or seven rounds. Berlanga did the worst he could to him. He made Alvarez so angry that now he wants to destroy him.”
And, for example, Canelo said about Jaime Munguía: “I liked fighting Munguía, that’s why I didn’t want to knock him out.”
Here, apparently, the story is different. But Berlanga is not so simple. His aggressive behavior stems from a difficult childhood – a rather familiar rags-to-riches story. Edgar’s father went to jail when the future boxer was only two days old. Berlanga Sr. returned when his son was 7.5 years old and signed him up for boxing.
Edgar recalled: “When my dad first came back, my mom attacked him: ‘We have to do something about him, this guy is crazy.’ He had crazy energy, he drove me crazy both at school and on the street.”
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At the same time, Berlanga played baseball and now jokes that it would be nice to get a contract in the Major Leagues. Relations with boxing were difficult: “When I was young I loved boxing and hated it at the same time. I hated having to train. I was young, I wanted to go on vacation, go to water parks and all that. But I couldn’t do it all.”
When Edgar was 10, his father was imprisoned again, for four years. At that time, Berlanga almost quit boxing, even though his father called him and asked him to continue training. It was possible to fully return and start a career only after my father returned.
Edgar Berlanga
Photo: Rich Schultz/Getty Images
Edgar quickly began making money fighting and is currently 22-0 with 17 knockout wins. And while Berlanga has yet to face opponents of Canelo’s level in his career, he is not at all worried and will not bow down to his star opponent: “The time has come to fight. You want to decapitate me, I want to do the same to you. How can I respect a guy I want to kill? You think I should respect him? Fuck you! No, you won’t respect your opponent either. Especially considering I grew up on the streets. There is no room for respect in the ring. And there is no room for remorse. He can knock me out in the first round. If you’re not careful, it can all be over very quickly. This is a tough sport. Every year people die in the ring. Every year there are seven to eight deaths. In the ring it’s all simple: you hit me or I hit you.”
Berlanga claims that he has had many enemies throughout his career, but that has not stopped him from building his career. Edgar is also a fan of Floyd Mayweather, because he managed to remain undefeated and stay relatively healthy. For Berlanga, this is practically a role model and an example of how to build a career. That is why Edgar claims that he always goes out with a fear of losing.
Saul Alvarez
Photo: Fake Images
In the case of the Canelo fight, such fears are well founded. Alvarez certainly gets his fair share of criticism, but he remains a big-punching fighter who can turn the lights out of any opponent. Berlanga, however, is not without power in his hands either and tells scary stories about his training: “I will be the stronger puncher in this fight, I have no doubt. 1000% that I hit harder than Canelo. During sparring I managed to knock out guys who weighed between 105 and 110 kg. There are a lot of ex-criminals on my team. And I have the same mentality in the ring. There I transform into a killer and on September 15 I will be ready for anything. Canelo? He needs air to live, like me, and he bleeds like me. It will be a spectacular fight.”
Edgar’s underdog status doesn’t bother him at all; he’s out to shock the world and prove people wrong for writing him off. Besides, Berlanga is hoping that Canelo’s underestimation will play a cruel joke on the Mexican. Opponents so tough that they have nothing to lose can actually be a threat to top boxers. Recently, Israil Madrimov was literally one round away from ruining Terence Crawford’s legacy at a time when no one expected it. Now Berlanga finds himself in a similar situation, and if Alvarez underestimates the wild American Puerlanga, he may pay dearly for it.
