Miguel Cotto, of Puerto Rico, left, fights Saúl (Canelo) Álvarez, of Mexico. Photograph by John Locher/AP

This past September, Floyd Mayweather, Jr., announced his retirement, and although plenty of boxing fans won’t miss him, a number of boxing executives surely will. The Mayweather era was also the pay-per-view era: in the United States, his last fourteen fights were broadcast only to viewers willing to pay for them. Manny Pacquiao was the other major pay-per-view attraction, but his drawing power is probably waning—certainly, it wasn’t helped by his uninspired performance against Mayweather, earlier this year. Who else might convince fans to voluntarily increase their cable bills?

Last month, Gennady Golovkin—a ferocious but affable middleweight virtuoso from Kazakhstan, known as G.G.G., or Triple G—was the main attraction in an HBO pay-per-view broadcast that attracted a modest number of purchases; boxing fans love him, and the hope is that before long, casual fans will fall in love, too. This past Saturday, another HBO pay-per-view show tried a different approach: a fight between Saúl (Canelo) Álvarez and Miguel Cotto, which was marketed as an excuse for fans to indulge their tribal passions. Álvarez, a twenty-five-year-old from Jalisco, is among the biggest sports celebrities in Mexico. And Cotto, who is thirty-five, is a hero in his native Puerto Rico, and just about anywhere else where Puerto Ricans gather. HBO’s promotional documentary began with establishing shots of Mexican and Puerto Rican flags, as the narrator, Liev Schreiber, primed viewers to expect a clash of civilizations.

What viewers got, instead, was a reasonably entertaining matchup, one preceded by a short concert by the reggaetón pioneer Yandel, and by a wildly uneven undercard. Guillermo Rigondeaux, a highly skilled but resolutely un-entertaining junior featherweight from Cuba, earned a characteristically dull victory. Francisco Vargas, a junior lightweight from Mexico, pulled off one of the year’s most thrilling comebacks: bruised and bleeding from a pair of slug-sized cuts, above and below his right eye, he charged out in the ninth round and landed a devastating straight right punch, the beginning of combination that sent his opponent to the canvas and then, not long after he got back to his feet, into the arms of the referee, who stopped the fight. This dramatic display evidently wasn’t good for Vargas’s eye, but it was surely good for his career: in boxing, a hard, memorable victory can be more advantageous than an easy one.

The fight took place in Las Vegas, where the Álvarez contingent handily out-shouted those supporting Cotto. But it was Cotto who made the matchup intriguing. Both Cotto and Álvarez had lost to Mayweather, but while Álvarez hadn’t lost before or since, Cotto had been defeated by a skilled but not transcendent opponent named Austin Trout. After his loss, Cotto signed on with a new trainer, Freddie Roach, the Hollywood-based strategist who is a boxing celebrity in his own right. Working with Roach, Cotto turned in three decisive victories in a row—a career resurrection, or close enough for the fans who want him to be great, and the promoters who need him to be.

In boxing, every victory is a relative victory: what matters is who you beat, and how. In Cotto’s case, the skeptics couldn’t help but notice that two of his three victims, Delvin Rodriguez and Daniel Geale, were rather ordinary boxers. The third, Sergio Martínez, was a previously brilliant champion who seemed, on the night Cotto beat him, to have only one functional knee, or possibly one fewer than that. Ever since that victory, a year ago, boxing fans have been trying to make sense of it: was it proof that Cotto was reborn, proof that he had a knack for choosing weak opponents, or a bit of both? In his three fights with Roach, Cotto had looked vicious. But he also hadn’t beaten a truly impressive opponent in more than eight years. At The Queensberry Rules, a boxing blog, Sam Sheppard wrote a delectable polemic entitled, “Why Miguel Cotto Has No Place in the Hall of Fame.” Saturday night offered Cotto a chance to make a fool of Sheppard, and of all the less eloquent boxing fans who agreed with Sheppard. The oddsmakers made Álvarez the favorite, with odds near three-to-one.

At the weigh-in, on Friday, Cotto weighed a hundred fifty-three and a half pounds, and Álvarez weighed a hundred and fifty-five pounds, which was the maximum weight allowed. But by the time they arrived in the ring, a day later, Álvarez seemed markedly bigger than Cotto, perhaps by more than fifteen pounds. Álvarez has a sturdy frame and heavy feet; Cotto was expected to be quicker. And Cotto spent much of the night on his toes, coming close and then darting away. But Álvarez, whose skills may still be improving, wasn’t easy to hit: he has a knack for economical head movement, ducking or swivelling just enough to stay out of reach. Compubox, which keeps track of matches, recorded that Cotto landed more jabs, while Álvarez landed more power punches and, by a small margin, more punches over all.

Of course, the point of professional boxing is not just to land but to hurt, and so this fight required viewers—and judges—to figure out whose punches hurt more. Mostly, it seemed that Álvarez’s did, and he was accordingly awarded a wide unanimous decision; reasonable people disagreed about whether the scores should have been closer, but just about everyone agreed that Álvarez had won. (There was one predictable and forgivable exception: Roach.) “The difference in power was clear,” said Jim Lampley, HBO’s play-by-play commentator. “People at ringside could see it, feel it, and hear it.”

By beating Cotto, Álvarez became, in one widely held view, the middleweight champion, while reaffirming his position as the best fighter at junior middleweight. Yet fans will debate how much credit he deserves, given that Cotto’s resurrection may have been oversold, and given that Álvarez didn’t manage to score a knockout, or even a knockdown. One winner on Saturday night was Pacquiao, whose destruction of Cotto, six years ago, now looks even more impressive. Despite being much smaller than Álvarez, Pacquiao bloodied and lumped Cotto’s face, knocked him down twice, and eventually forced the referee to stop the fight.

In the ring after the decision, HBO’s Max Kellerman asked Álvarez if he would be willing to fight Golovkin next—it would likely be the most anticipated fight since Mayweather-Pacquiao. “I'll put the gloves on right now and fight him right now,” Álvarez said, through a translator. At the post-fight press conference, Álvarez’s promoter, Oscar De La Hoya, didn’t sound quite so eager. “There’s the Triple G fight—there’s obviously other fights,” he said, adding, “I have to get a feel of what Canelo wants to do.” Álvarez may now be the most valuable pay-per-view star in the sport, and De La Hoya didn’t sound eager to match him against Golovkin, who would probably be favored. At least not right away.

The biggest lesson of Mayweather’s career is that fans who insist that they will only accept the most competitive matchups are not to be trusted. (We bought Mayweather’s fights even when he chose opponents who posed little threat to him.) De La Hoya, who has taken a variety of attitudes toward Mayweather, and recently settled upon disdain, seemed to be criticizing the Mayweather strategy when he bragged, during the press conference, about his willingness to make the best—the toughest—matches. But Álvarez’s record contains only one loss. He and his promoter must now figure out how much and how soon they are willing to risk a second one. “This is a new era in our sport,” De La Hoya said. Is it?