If you’re a Puerto Rican boxer, when Felix “Tito” Trinidad talks, you listen. 

So when the hall of famer and island icon went on a three-mile run with unbeaten rising star Edgar Berlanga, the New Yorker was all ears.

“He was just breaking a lot of things down to me,” said Berlanga of his chat with Trinidad. “And one of the things he said that opened up my eyes was 'Stay here and train. You got the Puerto Rican Day weekend coming up and it's best for you to be out here on the island so that people can see you. They're gonna support you and if they love you now, they're gonna love you twice as much.' So I took his advice.”

Eight weeks in Puerto Rico later, Berlanga is back in the Big Apple and ready for his second headlining gig at Madison Square Garden’s Theater this Saturday. This one has a little more heat on it than his first one against Steve Rolls in March, though, as he will face Alexis Angulo on the eve of the National Puerto Rican Day Parade, which returns after a two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

That’s a big deal, but the 25-year-old is eager to take it on. 

“Yeah, I'm ready for it,” Berlanga said. “I know it's not easy to fill those shoes with what (Miguel) Cotto did and Trinidad did. All I want to do is bring back boxing to Puerto Rico, that fire, that light, that thing that people wanted for the Puerto Rican Day weekend. I'm blessed to be in this position.”

And he got that blessing from Puerto Rican boxing’s pope, who let him know that a packed house of Boricuas will take his game to a new level.

“He (Trinidad) told me that night I'm gonna turn into a different type of monster that night, for sure,” said Berlanga. “With him, he grew off the energy in the arena with the people, and he said that night is gonna be the same thing for me. He said he knows I'm gonna show out that night.”

If he does, it would be good timing, as Berlanga has been taking heat as of late for not knocking people out the way he did in his first 16 fights. Though it may be ludicrous to most to hear that he’s getting criticized for simply going through what every young fighter experiences, such is boxing circa 2022, where there is no pleasing everyone.

“I feel like I still got a chip on my shoulder,” said Berlanga, who followed up a torrid string of 16 first-round knockouts with a trio of decision wins over Demond Nicholson, Marcelo Esteban Coceres and Steve Rolls. “I'm glad I got that experience of going to those later rounds, but I feel like people still don't respect my game. I'm still fighting for that. I want people to understand that this kid’s got it. But I feel like the opposite. I feel like everybody thinks I don't have it, that I was a fluke or a hype job. But it's boxing. When I was knocking people out, people were saying I was knocking bums out. Now that I go the distance, everybody's saying that I'm a bum. In boxing, if you ain't got haters, you ain't doing it right. You have to have haters. You can't make everybody happy. The only people you can make happy is your family. So my family - my son, my wife, my father, my mother, and the rest of my close family - those are the only people I want to make happy. I can't please the world, so I take it like it comes.”

That’s an important lesson for Berlanga to learn as he continues to march up the super middleweight ladder, and he does appear to have the maturity to let the critics kick rocks while he hones his craft. And don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story, such as the reality that the only one to stop Rolls was Gennadiy Golovkin and that the only stoppage loss in the career of Coceres – who dropped Berlanga in the ninth round of their bout – was Billy Joe Saunders.

“My first fight going the distance (against Nicholson), that was the fight that if I would have had another 10-15 seconds, they would have stopped the fight,” recalled Berlanga. “The Coceres fight, I broke his orbital bone in three places, and that was another fight that was supposed to be stopped as well. Then my last fight, I fought Rolls, and Rolls had a decent gameplan of trying to box. Everybody expects all these things of me because of the first-round knockouts, but this is boxing. You're not gonna knock everybody out. Some fights you'll catch a knockout, some fights you won't, especially when you're stepping up in competition.”

That’s not to say it wasn’t fun to watch Berlanga’s rise and wonder how long his first-round streak would last. Did he think it was going to last forever?

“I knew it wasn't gonna last forever,” he said. “But even now, I'm like, ‘Damn, I had 16 first-round knockouts.’ That's crazy. And it wasn't like I was knocking people out that they just picked up from the corner store, like, ‘Yo, come here, I'm gonna give you 500 bucks, you can jump in there and fight,’ and I knock the guy out. (Laughs) I was fighting guys that went the distance, that were durable, and I was just taking them out.”

And he will get another knockout, likely several, as the years go on. Remember, he’s only 19 fights into his pro career and still a raw talent. Of course, him being in the main event spotlight only increases the desire to see him move quicker than most fighters with less than 20 bouts, but with Top Rank moving him and Trinidad giving him some helpful advice, Berlanga is going to do just fine. Plus, this is just how he pictured it.

“I dreamed of this as a kid, I've seen it all play out in my head, and it's happening,” he said, as cool as can be under the pressure of the moment.

“I feel like I always had that poise,” Berlanga explains. “In the amateurs, I always had that pro style, and I always had the look and the charisma. I had that as a kid - I'd walk into a room and light it up. Me turning pro, it wasn't nothing like, 'Wow.' It was more like, 'Thank you, God,' for everything he's given me. Sometimes you can have it all, but it's just not made for you. People block your blessings and you don't end up where you want to be.”

Berlanga is where he wants to be. And he already knows where he wants to be this time next year.

“Puerto Rican Day weekend with a title on the line,” he said. “That would be huge, and a dream come true for me. First, I obviously gotta handle my business Saturday and finish the year with another fight, and then we look forward to 2023.”