By Dan Ambrose: Just to show you how desperate Golden Boy Promotions president Oscar De La Hoya has become to try and get boxing fans excited about the September 15th mismatch between WBC junior middleweight champion Saul Alvarez and the slender light welterweight Josesito Lopez that has been hand-picked by Golden Boy, De La Hoya has resorted to bringing up how he was thrashed by the much smaller Manny Pacquiao back in 2008 to show that size doesn’t matter. Unfortunately it does matter.
De la Hoya said this at the recent Alvarez-Lopez press conference: “People can say he’s a welterweight [light welterweight in this case], people can say that that he’s never been on the big stage with a great champion [great?] like Canelo Alvarez. Do you remember when I fought Manny Pacquiao and people said he was too small for me. Look at what he did to me. He destroyed me. So there’s no fighter out there who has no chance or no shot at all, because inside that squared circle, you never know what’s going to happen and this is living proof right there [De La Hoya then points to Lopez]. Josesito Lopez has the desire, the heart, he’s living the Rocky moment.”
A couple things here. The crowd didn’t seem to react positively to De La Hoya’s speech. One it seemed like a really desperate move on De La Hoya’s part to bring up that painful memory of his fight with Pacquiao. But more importantly it was something that has no bearing to the mismatch between Lopez and Alvarez. This is a whole different fight. When De La Hoya fought Pacquiao, De La Hoya was a part time fighter at that point in his career, who had only had a small handful of fights in the past five years. De La Hoya was basically a shot fighter. He may have been bigger than Pacquiao, but he wasn’t in his prime any longer. But then De La Hoya messed things up for himself by going on a crazy diet to lean down to 147 instead of doing what most fighters do by simply dehydrating down to make the fight and then putting the weight back on after the weigh-in. That sank whatever chance that De La Hoya had in winning the fight. Pacquiao was in his prime in 2008, and someone who would have been a problem to most fighters at welterweight with the exception of Floyd Mayweather Jr possibly. But the Lopez-Alvarez fight involves a young junior middleweight with excellent power and great boxing skills in Alvarez facing a skinny light welterweight who got lucky in his last fight against Victor Ortiz when Ortiz suffered a broken jaw. Ortiz would have won that fight if not for the injury.
It was just sad to see how desperate De La Hoya looked in trying to hype the Lopez-Alvarez fight, and how non-responsive the crowd was to his message. It’s a bad fight, but what makes it even worse is that it comes on the same night as the Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. vs. Sergio Martinez fight on HBO. Golden Boy should have found someone better than Lopez to face Alvarez, preferably a junior middleweight instead of them combing the light welterweight division to find a skinny guy to fight Alvarez.
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