In the dozen years since he became world champion, Canelo Alvarez has confronted a wide range of styles and personalities but only one opponent - a 40-year-old Shane Mosley – with more defeats on his record than the five suffered by John Ryder.
And while the statistic underpins Ryder’s status as a long-odds outsider this week in Guadalajara, it must also be recognised as a testament to his willpower and resilience.
Ryder failed three times to win a British title and yet has rebounded time and again to earn his shot at the global jackpot.
The first of his setbacks as a pro came 10 years ago in a domestic title fight against Billy Joe Saunders at middleweight, losing to the future world champion by a single round on one judge’s card, and within a year Ryder was working as a nightclub doorman to boost his income while battling injury and fighting for £300 ($375) in a six-rounder as one of 13 fights on a card staged at a tiny venue in north London.
When he was outpointed by Jack Arnfield in another crack at the British middleweight title in 2016, Ryder shed 14lbs in the week of the fight. “It was either move up or give up,” he said at the time and his trainer Tony Sims has been candid enough to take the blame for the delay in moving up, because he felt his charge would be too short to make an impact at super-middle.
In his only world title fight to date, Ryder lost a unanimous points decision to fellow Brit, Callum Smith, for the WBA belt in Liverpool in 2019 in a contest that was tighter than the scorecards suggested.
Last year’s split-decision win against the American Daniel Jacobs in London ranks as the best entry on Ryder’s record, a verdict that was hotly-disputed but the golfing legend Jack Nicklaus used to say there are no pictures on a scorecard, and the bare figures left Ryder well-placed inside the world’s top ten at 168lbs.
Now 34, Ryder is the eighth Briton to take on Canelo – only Matthew Hatton in 2011 and Callum Smith in 2020 have gone the distance. Most recently, Saunders succumbed after eight rounds in Dallas almost two years ago, battered by a vicious right uppercut that crushed his eye socket and his hopes of an upset victory.
“It’s like the great snooker players,” said Saunders on reflection, “they think five or six shots ahead. And Canelo let me get away with minor stuff at the beginning. I kept going one way, he let me make the same mistake and then capitalised later. He worked his game plan to force me into making the mistake.”
Before heading to Los Angeles to finalise training, Ryder had been sharing an apartment in Essex with Joe Cordina, whose recent showdown with Tajikistan’s Shavkat Rakhimov for the IBF super-featherweight title was featured on DAZN and will figure in Fight of the Year debates come December.
Like Saunders in his review of the Canelo fight, Cordina gave a revealing insight into an adjustment which proved key to the outcome: “I found it better when I was letting him work in close and then catching him up and around (with uppercuts and hooks). When I was standing back, he was finding the range with the back hand to the body and beating me to the punch as I tried the right uppercut.”
Cordina also remembered feeling “heavy and tired” as early as the fourth round, only for his “second wind” to kick in a couple of rounds later. There was composure rather than panic, allied to the presence of mind and self-belief needed to make those changes that only the shrewdest boxing brains can master.
Does Ryder have the nous to adapt when necessary? And Will Canelo let him?
The hard slogs against Smith and Jacobs will serve Ryder well when he needs to dig deep but Canelo’s form against the same men only emphasises the magnitude of Ryder’s mission.
When British fight fans reflect on the best wins by their countrymen in foreign rings, Mexico is usually in the conversation. It was there that another Londoner, John H Stracey, overcame a first-round knockdown to force a sixth-round stoppage against Jose Napoles to lift the WBC welterweight title in December 1975.
Like Canelo, Napoles had been a pro for more than 17 years and world champion for 12 of them. In Napoles’ corner was Angelo Dundee, two months on from shepherding Muhammad Ali to victory against Joe Frazier in the ‘Thrilla In Manila’. Dundee was blunt in his analysis of Napoles’ demise: “It happened in one fight, my guy became old that night.”
Napoles never fought again and, almost half a century on, the odds on offer this week indicate that Ryder must bank on Canelo being swarmed in the same manner by Father Time.