By Jason Kim: It was made official today that James Kirkland (31-1, 27 KO’s) will step in to replace the injured Paul Williams in a September 15th pay-per-view fight against Golden Boy Promotions budding star WBC junior middleweight champion Saul Alvarez (40-0-1, 29 KO’s) at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The fight has been signed and the bout will go forward to showcase the 21-year-old Alvarez’s skills for the boxing public in the United States. It still seems kind of early to make Alvarez a PPV fighter because he’s still never really faced any real threats. However, Alvarez is huge in Mexico and his popularity has carried over into the United States with good ratings for fights that he’s been a part of. The real test will his fight with Kirkland on September 15th. I suppose Golden Boy will consider it a victory if Alvarez can draw 200,000 PPV buys. It’s not likely he gets more than that, because he’s really not well known among casual boxing fans.
Alvarez’s progress has been slowed as of late because Golden Boy has been reluctant to put him in with better opposition. He’s faced three 40-year-old fighters in the past two years, and quite a few less than stellar opponents. For a world champion, Alvarez has been matched way too carefully to the point where he’s seemingly being still coddled with soft match making despite the fact that he’d held the WBC title since March of last year when he beat a welterweight Matthew Hatton, not a junior middleweight, to win the vacant WBC junior middleweight title.
Kirkland defeated Carlos Molina under questionable terms in his last fight in March when Molina was disqualified when one of his corner persons stepped into the ring after the bell had run ending the round. However, Molina had been knocked down in the round and was being given a standing eight count, which went past the end of the round. The referee decided to play it by the book and chose to disqualify Molina rather than merely ordering his corner person out of the ring and letting it go.
The ending was bad because Kirkland was losing the fight and there’s still questions whether he would have won had it gone the full 12. At any rate, it was a bad performance for Kirkland to get picked out to fight for a world title. You’d like to see a fighter like Kirkland perform better before getting selected. Kirkland looked out of his depth against Molina and showed zero skills on the inside.
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