By Dan Ambrose: WBC junior middleweight champion Saul Alvarez (40-0-1, 29 KOs) still doesn’t have an opponent scheduled for his September 15th fight in Las Vegas, and it’s unknown who his promoters at Golden Boy Promotions will be picking out for him.
What is known is that there is a tremendous amount of pressure on Golden Boy to find a big name to face the 21-year-old Alvarez due to the competition they’ll be facing on the same night from Top Rank, who will be putting on a fight between WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. vs. Sergio Martinez on HBO in a pay-per-view bout.
Alvarez’s fight won’t be a PPV bout, but they’ll still need to match him against someone good enough to draw fans away from the Chavez Jr-Martinez fight. Some of the names that have been mentioned and then later rejected are less than appealing, and are almost comical. While Golden Boy has a lot of fighters in their stable, they don’t have a lot of bodies in the junior middleweight and middleweight divisions that they’re willing to put in with Alvarez. They could easily fix this by matching Alvarez against #3 WBC Erislandy Lara, a fighter who recently shined with a one-sided 10 round decision win over Freddy Hernandez, but Golden Boy seem totally reluctant to match Lara against Alvarez.
That’s understandable because as good as Alvarez is, Lara looks a lot better. Then why is Alvarez a champion and not Lara? Well, he got positioned by Golden Boy into the spot by matching Alvarez against a welterweight Mathew Hatton, and that gave Alvarez an easy title. And since he’s had the belt, Golden Boy has been careful to match Alvarez against a lot of beatable opposition like 40-year-old past his best Shane Mosley for example. Alvarez is a popular draw in Mexico, and that makes it important that he stay a champion as long as possible. You probably can’t do that if you mess things up by putting Lara with Alvarez. It would end things before Alvarez had brought in the big money.
I expect Golden Boy to make an announcement any day now with another beatable guy for Alvarez to fight. They’ve already ruled out pretty much every halfway decent opponent, but it’s going to be someone from their Golden Boy stable so it’s not going to be a big surprise when they do announce the pick.
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