By Dan Ambrose: It’s still hard to believe Golden Boy Promotions is allowing their “Golden Goose” WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (41-0-1, 30 KO’s) fight WBA junior middleweight champion Austin Trout (26-0, 14 KO’s) on May 4th in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Trout, who refers to Canelo as the “Golden Goose” for Golden Boy, had his doubts that he’d get the shot at fighting Canelo because a lot of Canelo’s match-ups have come against 147 pounders pretty much since he moved up in weight.
If you look at the flat-footed fighting style of the orange-haired Canelo and then compare it to the fleet-footed Trout, you can see the potential there for Trout to frustrate Canelo by making him miss with his big shots.
This is like taking a time machine back to 2009 and inserting Trout in the place of Floyd Mayweather Jr, and having Canelo as Juan Manuel Marquez. It’s the same type of match-up with the same problems presenting themselves for Canelo as they did for Marquez. Trout is simply taller, with longer reach, better hand speed, and better defense than Canelo.
With a potential big money fight on the line for Canelo against Mayweather in September, it’s a shock that Golden Boy actually let Canelo take this fight. This obviously must have been something Canelo asked for and/or demanded from Golden Boy because I can’t see Golden Boy ever voluntarily putting their Golden Goose Canelo in with a fighter as good as Trout because he’s going to pluck him clean in front of the entire world on May 4th.
Once Trout has plucked the Golden Goose, I don’t know that he’ll ever lay the golden eggs that Golden Boy envisioned when they started grooming Canelo years ago in fights against 40-year-old Carlos Balomir and 40-year-old Lovemore N’dou. All those years of soft match-making for Canelo will be down the drain if Trout humiliates him on May 4th.
We recently saw Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. finally fight a real opponent in Sergio Martinez after all these years, and we saw what happened to Chavez Jr. there with him getting beaten soundly. Now we’re about to see Canelo finally fight a real fighter in Trout, and it looks like we’re going to see a similar result.
That’s the thing about hype. When you get promoters building up big inflated resumes for their fighters by carefully matching them like scientists, then you end up with a fighter that is nowhere as good as his record. I think that’s what we’re going to see from Canelo when he steps inside the ring against Trout on May 4th.
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