Canelo vs. Angulo signed for March 8th!

By Boxing News - 01/09/2014 - Comments

canelo544By Dan Ambrose: The March 8th fight between former WBA/WBC light middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (42-1-1, 30 KO’s) and Alfredo Angulo (22-3, 18 KO’s) is reportedly a done deal. According to Dan Rafael of ESPN, the fight has been signed off. The fight will be taking place at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada, and it’s expected to be televised on Showtime pay-per-view.

Hopefully, Golden Boy Promotions will change their mind about making the Canelo-Angulo fight PPV, because it’s not nearly a good enough fight on it’s own for it to be a bout that boxing fans should have to pay for. This could change if Golden Boy stacks the undercard with fights like Adrien Broner vs. Marcos Maidana II. That would make it worthwhile for a PPV card, but short of that it’s not really PPV worthy.

Canelo has a big fan base in the United States, and that obviously gives him and Golden Boy confidence that he can have fights against the likes of Angulo as a PPV bout. But Floyd Mayweather Jr. would never make a fight against Angulo as a PPV. He would know better than to pick out this opponent as a PPV bout, because there’s no way you can sell the fight to the boxing public. The reason for that is Angulo was stopped in the 10th round by Erislandy Lara in his last fight a year ago in June. Angulo was also stopped by James Kirkland in a 6th round stoppage in 2011.

Canelo is also coming off of a defeat. He was beaten by Floyd Mayweather Jr. by a 12 round decision last September in a fight where Canelo looked embarrassingly over-matched by Mayweather. Canelo had talked a lot how he was going to give Mayweather his first defeat of his career, but when it came to him trying walk his talk, Canelo came up empty. For Canelo, that was his second straight poor performance, because he had looked bad in beating Austin Trout last year in April.

The bad thing about the Canelo-Angulo fight is it puts Canelo is a situation where his career will take a major blow if he loses this fight. It’s not as if Angulo is a top fighter now, so getting beaten by him will be a really huge setback for Canelo’s career. Golden Boy would have to figure out a way to rebuild him after a loss like that, and I’m not sure that would be a good direction for them to take.



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