By Allan Fox: WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez has to decide soon which one of his junior middleweight titles he plans on keeping because the World Boxing Council doesn’t let their champions to hold multiple belts.
According to Fightnews.com, Canelo is expected to keep the WBA title rather than the WBC belt. However, it’s very, very hard to imagine the WBC forcing the issue before Canelo’s September 14th fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. because of the big sanctioning fee that would be available for that fight if Canelo were to have the WBC strap.
That would be a huge loss for the WBC if Canelo were to give up his WBC strap and fight with just the WBA title on the line, but that could happen.
If Canelo gives up his WBA title before the Mayweather fight, then the winner of this Saturday’s fight between Erislandy Lara and Alfredo Angulo will become the new WBA junior middleweight champion. Mayweather holds the Super WBA World junior middleweight title.
The WBA hasn’t put any pressure on Mayweather to defend the title even though he hasn’t defended it in 12 months since winning it against Miguel Cotto last year in May.
By the time Mayweather does defend the title against Canelo in September, it’ll have been 16 months since Mayweather won the title. It’s got to be nice to have the sanctioning bodies let you sit on a title for almost a year and half without defending it.
It would be in the World Boxing Council’s best interest for Canelo to keep their WBC title because it would mean huge sanctioning fees each time he fights and it would give them more clout because of Canelo’s huge popularity among Mexican boxing fans.
It might be better for the WBC change their rules about champions holding more than one belt because they’ll lose out on a lot of top fighters holding their titles in the future with this rule.
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