By Dan Ambrose: WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez will be traveling to Panama on Tuesday to pick up his World Boxing Association 154 lb. title that he captured last month in a win over Austin Trout in San Antonio, Texas.
According to The Record, Canelo is hoping to hold down both the WBA and WBC titles at the same time in order to be the unified champion.
This is going to be interesting to see if the World Boxing Council makes an acceptation in his case because in my understanding they don’t allow their champions to hold other belts.
If the WBC lets Canelo hold multiple titles then they’re going to have other champions wondering why they too can’t keep the WBC strap in addition to their other titles.
It’s going to put the WBC in a bad position if they look the other way for Canelo but then keep other champs from holding multiple titles with one of them being a WBC strap.
Whether Canelo holds onto both titles or gets stripped of one of them, it matters little if he’s not fighting his mandatory challengers. As far as I can tell, Canelo hasn’t fought his mandatory for his WBC title for two years since beating Ryan Rhodes in June of 2011.
I don’t know why the WBC has let Canelo get away with this because they quickly took Andre Ward’s WBC 168 lb. title away from him after only four months when he was injured and they designed him as the Emeritus champion. And with WBC welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr., he didn’t defend his title for year and half before finally facing Robert “The Ghost” Guerrero earlier this month and the WBC strip him either.
So if Canelo is going long, long stretches in between fighting his mandatory challengers, what’s the point of him collecting titles? If the titles are going to go into a limbo period where the mandatory challengers weight ages for a title, Canelo might as well not even have titles because he could then fight whoever he wants without inconveniencing the mandatory contenders who waiting around for ages to get a title shot.
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