By Dan Ambrose: This past week, WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (41-0-1, 30 KO’s) chose to pull a self-defeating move this past week in deciding not to fight on the May 4th due to Floyd Mayweather Jr. failing to sign a contract to fight him in September. Instead, Canelo will be moving his unification fight against WBA World junior middleweight champion Austin Trout (26-0, 14 KO’s) to the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas on April 20th.
The move was done because Canelo didn’t want to help Mayweather if he wasn’t going to get the mega fight with Mayweather in return. Trout wasn’t too happen with his fight with Canelo being pulled from the Mayweather card because he realizes how much attention the fight would have received had it stayed on that date.
Trout said to Primerahora.com “I wish it was still on the undercard of Floyd Mayweather Jr., since it is a larger event that will receive a lot attention.”
It wasn’t a smart thing for Canelo to do because you don’t walk away from the kind of attention publicity that you can receive on a Mayweather undercard. By Canelo not fighting on Mayweather’s undercard, he still isn’t going to get the Mayweather fight. The only people Canelo hurt with this move is himself and Trout, because Mayweather has already got the Cinco de Mayo date on May 4th, and he’s got a Mexican that he’s facing in Robert Guerrero on that date.
Mayweather is going to have massive amounts of Mexican fight fans purchasing his fight with Guerrero on Showtime/CBS, and Golden Boy has already replaced Canelo with the highly popular Mexican fighter Abner Mares, who will be facing WBC featherweight champion Daniel Ponce De Leon in a fight matching two Mexican fighters.
You’ve got to feel sorry for Trout because his fight with Canelo will be seen by far fewer boxing fans now that it’s taking place on April 20th, which means fewer people, will get a chance to see him beat Canelo if that’s what in fact takes place.
There are some boxing fans who think Canelo partially pulled out of the Mayweather card because he didn’t want the entire world to see him getting badly beaten by Trout, and by fighting on a smaller card with fewer boxing fans seeing the fight, his loss may slip below the radar of many boxing fans. In other words, Canelo losing to Trout won’t be as bad because many casual boxing fans won’t have seen the fight.
If you look at it from that perspective, it doesn’t look like nearly as dumb a move by Canelo in him pulling out of the Mayweather card. That seems like a genius move because people won’t see him getting plucked by Trout.
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