Golovkin, Alvarez settle grudge today

Canelo Alvarez has gone to bed the last few months thinking about how he’s going to knock out Gennady Golovkin in their middleweight title rematch.

To wake up Sunday morning as the 160-pound champion, though, he’ll have to take some chances he didn’t in his first fight with Golovkin a year ago. And that could be a real problem against a fearsome puncher who has knocked out 34 fighters in his 39 professional fights.

“I know it’s going to be a tough fight,” Alvarez said. “But I’m going in there to knock him out.”

Alvarez and Golovkin get another chance to settle what they couldn’t last September when they meet in a rematch of their first fight, which ended in a draw. They do so Saturday night on the Las Vegas Strip not as the gentleman fighters they portrayed themselves to be then, but as bitter rivals who legitimately seem to dislike each other.

That showed at Friday’s weigh-in, when the two fighters had to be separated in their only face-toface appearance before the fight. Golovkin weighed 159.6 pounds and Alvarez weighed 159.4.

A positive test by Alvarez for clenbuterol forced the rematch to be postponed from May. At the same time it produced some hard feelings between the two fighters over Alvarez’s contention that it was caused by eating contaminated meat in his native Mexico.

Whether that translates into a more entertaining fight remains to be seen. But both fighters seem determined not to let it be decided by the ringside judges.

“It’s a real fight,” Golovkin said this week. “Like a real war.” /