Saúl ‘Canelo’ Álvarez: ‘I want to keep fighting my whole life. I so enjoy it’

‘Eight hundred pesos,” Saúl ‘Canelo’ Álvarez says quietly as a little smile dances across his freckled face and he remembers how much he earned on his professional debut in October 2005. He was just 15 and that fight purse, which is the equivalent of just under $40, seems endearing compared to the $160m Álvarez is expected to make for the three bouts he has planned this year.

Before we turn to the seemingly unstoppable wealth and fame that now surrounds him as the best boxer in the world, Álvarez breaks down the money he made for stopping Abraham Gonzales in the fourth round of his debut in the Mexican city of Tonalá on the outskirts of Guadalajara. “They actually only paid me half of that,” he says of his 800 pesos. “The other half was in tickets. I gave all the tickets to my family.”

He scrunches up his face and laughs. “I’ve got an absolutely massive family so in the end I came home with 400 pesos. But I didn’t do it for the money because I was working with my dad [selling ice-creams in Guadalajara]. I didn’t know any other way of living, so 300, 400 pesos seemed a lot.”

They called him Canelo then, just as we all do now, because of his cinnamon colouring. His gingery hair, freckles and pale skin made him look more Irish than Mexican. Canelo is now 31 and he still carries something of the Fighting Irish in him because, when asked how much longer he wants to keep boxing, he looks very serious. “I want to keep fighting my whole life. I so enjoy it. I am fighting for legacy now. The money’s already there.”

His gentle swagger is rooted in the cold, hard reality of his current domination of boxing. While he soon downgrades his hope of fighting forever to a more realistic “six, maybe seven years”, Canelo’s ambition retains