Canelo missed the cleanest sales pitch David Benavidez could have made. Benavidez didn’t just beat Gilberto Ramirez on the Cinco de Mayo card. He stopped him inside six rounds, took the WBO and WBA cruiserweight titles, and gave himself fresh ammunition in a rivalry Canelo Alvarez still refuses to enter.
Canelo was in the arena earlier in the night, watching Jaime Munguia win the WBA super middleweight title in the co-feature. Munguia recently joined Team Canelo and Eddy Reynoso, so Alvarez had a clear reason to be there. The harder part to ignore is that he left before Benavidez produced the kind of performance that keeps the old question alive.
Benavidez used that exit exactly how most people expected him to use it.
“It was a shame that Canelo wasn’t able to watch that fight there because I think I might have scared him away,” Benavidez said on The Ariel Helwani Show. “I am a bad dude, man. I’m a bad mother****a.”
That is Benavidez at his most direct. He has chased Canelo for years, and Alvarez has shown no interest in giving him the fight. The knockout of Ramirez will not force Canelo into anything, but it gives Benavidez another public argument to make.
The problem for Canelo is optics. Leaving before Benavidez’s fight gave him control over where he was seen, but it also handed Benavidez a ready-made line. If Canelo never wanted the fight before, watching Benavidez destroy Ramirez probably was not going to change that.
Still, Benavidez now has a bigger belt collection, a cleaner talking point, and another reason to say Canelo wants no part of him. That may be the whole game at this point.
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Last Updated on 2026/05/06 at 5:11 PM
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