Andre Ward is one of the few great champions in boxing history to retire from the sport with an unbeaten record.
Ward enjoyed an accomplished professional career which spanned across 13 years between 2004 and 2017.
The former pound-for-pound star defeated each of the 32 opponents that he faced, reigning as a unified world champion at super-middleweight before he made the move up to light-heavyweight towards the end of the tenure.
He boasts victories over the likes of Mikkel Kessler, Carl Froch and Chad Dawson, but perhaps the most memorable wins of his career came against Sergey Kovalev.
Ward defeated the retired Russian star twice in the space of seven months, outpointing him in their first encounter in November of 2016, before going on to stop him in the eighth round of their rematch in the summer of 2017 to successfully defend his WBA, WBO and IBF titles at 175lbs.
One fighter that Ward never ended up facing before his retirement is Mexican icon Canelo Alvarez, who was campaigning at middleweight when the American drew the curtain on his career in September 2017.
Speaking on The Breakfast Club, Ward admitted that whilst he believes Canelo didn’t avoid facing him, he questions the Mexican great’s boxing resume and his choice of opponents throughout his career.
“I’ll never say Canelo ducked me because he didn’t, but in terms of his resume, it’s a little website called Boxrec, and if you know what you looking at you can look at the opponents that he fought right, and people say ‘he fought this name and he fought that name’ where did he fight that name when he fought him?
“When he fought Kovalev, Kovalev was cooked, he wasn’t the ‘Krusher’, he wasn’t an undefeated guy he had lost then, he didn’t even wanna fight Golovkin, HBO pressed him.”
Canelo is less than two months away from another career defining night as he prepares to face fellow pound-for-pound superstar Terence Crawford in a defence of his undisputed super-middleweight championship at the Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas on September 13.
