Virgil Hunter spoke with Thaboxingvoice.com to reflect on Alfredo Angulo’s performance against Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez last March. ”I’m surprised Alfredo didn’t got knocked out”, Hunter told us. Referee Tony Weeks stopped the fight after nine and a half one-sided rounds. Hunter added, “Canelo never even knocked him down. That surprised me a lot. He was fighting a shell of Alfredo Angulo.”
Virgil Hunter explained what went wrong, “Three months before the fight, I called Alfredo and told him that he needed to come in and train, to work on his conditioning. I told him that he was likely going to get the Canelo fight and that we needed to be ready.” But according to the trainer, Alfredo Angulo had lots of issues outside of the ring, including family issues and he wasn’t able to fulfill his trainer’s wishes. “Canelo’s team knew that when he wasn’t with me, he wasn’t training, so they did the smart thing and waited till only eight weeks before the fight to announce the fight”
The result was that when Alfredo Angulo showed up at camp, eight weeks before the fight, he was 34 pounds overweight. ”The whole camp was about cutting off the weight”, Hunter explained. He continued, ”It almost killed him. He was a dead man going in to that fight.”
Virgil Hunter and his fighter still decided to go on with the fight. He elaborated, ”You can’t tell a man to turn down a large sum of money. If he had millions in the bank, I would have told him to turn down the fight, but we basically had no choice.”
Thaboxingvoice.com asked whether Hunter feels if this fight and the outcome of it is going to have an impact on Alfredo Angulo mentally. The trainer answered that he feels his fighter has rebounded very well. He explained, “Alfredo knows that he didn’t do everything right, but he is committed now. He moved to the Bay Area, so he can train everyday.”
Hunter still regrets what happened leading up to the Alvarez fight. He told us, “If I had another version of Alfredo for the Canelo fight, the version that fought Lara for instance, It would have been very interesting.”
