Is David Benavidez’s Canelo Persistence Creeping Into Obsession?

It’s an old story at this point.

A deserving David Benavidez gets passed over for a Canelo Alvarez fight. Everybody pouts. Canelo fights someone else, someone significantly less deserving (and, now, even less marketable). Media stooges and fanboys bite at narratives about how “better than expected” Canelo’s less-than-deserving opponent was. Positive pay-per-view numbers are floated out to support how that weak fight really wasn’t so weak after all. Alvarez cruises into his next fight, bursting at the seams with an even greater sense of entitlement.

With proven bankable boxing draws in short supply, those who CAN generate elite-class numbers get to do pretty much whatever they want in this sport.

Gervonta Davis, for example, can create generational wealth from a professional lifetime of big-ticket “next best thing to elite” opposition.

Hell, some fighters these days get that kind of “do whatever you want” deference based on the slightest hint of a whiff that they may, possibly, be able to generate some real revenue.

Boxing business people are absolutely starved for in-the-black opportunities and that hunger has many doing crappy, cynical things like embracing murderous Saudi regimes, drug lords, and, to an admittedly less evil extent, coddling a certain red-headed Mexican who likes to wear silk jammies in public.

Those desperate boxing hunger pangs have meant good things and bad things for David Benavidez.

On the plus side, the entertaining pressure fighter has made a good deal of money with the folks at Premier Boxing Champions (PBC) as a main-eventer who has next-level star potential, but has yet to become that next-level star.

However, this dynamic also makes it so that the star directly above him– Canelo– has the leverage to ignore him indefinitely, forever denying him an opportunity to become that next-level star he aspires to be.

The sane, level-headed strategy for Benavidez would be to just move on from thoughts of Canelo, get over him like one would get over that girl who simply won’t give you the time of day. Instead, Benavidez is starting to come off like the guy who repeatedly gets snubbed by a girl and decides that hanging around her house, behind bushes, at all hours of the day and night, is a viable path to the girl’s heart.

“Canelo, he says that I can’t offer him nothing,” Benavidez said on the Organically Speaking podcast. “I think Canelo’s a great fighter. I believe in myself. I believe I can beat the s**t out of him. Now, if I have all four major world titles at 175, in my head that’s the only way the fight’s gonna happen.

I’m already number one in line to fight for all four belts at 175 against the winner of Beterbiev-Bivol. I win all four belts, it’d be a great fight and maybe we could do a catchweight, you can put the 168 pound belts, I can put the 175 pound belts and we can fight together, winner take all.”

And everyone thought that Benavidez moving up to 175 was actually him moving on from his raging Canelo fantasies.

The reality is that, for any number of reasons, Alvarez doesn’t want to fight Benavidez. Period. And, because of his still significant drawing power, he gets to call all the shots on everything and step around everyone who displeases him in any way.

Benavidez’s own promoter Sampson Lewkowicz has been telling people this for years already, even while floating out his own dubious fight offers towards the unreceptive Mexican superstar.

“All of you, please don’t continue fantasizing on Canelo,” Lewkowicz told reporters after Benavidez’s three-round demolition of David Lemieux in 2022. “He will not take a step ahead to fight…the champion of the people. Let’s not talk anymore about Canelo. It doesn’t exist… So please, don’t talk about Canelo. It won’t happen and will likely never happen.”

Benavidez is rumored to be facing Jesse Hart in December in a stay busy fight ahead of an anticipated shot at the Beterbiev-Bivol winner. And then, in his heart of hearts, apparently, he hopes to lure Canelo into finally meeting him.

Some might call that a bold strategy in pursuit of a dream.

Some may call it persistence crossing over into obsession.

Others, who’ve been following this Canelo-Benavidez story for years already will, perhaps correctly, call it a frustrating waste of everyone’s time.