By Dan Ambrose: Former WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (43-1-1, 31 KO’s) met with Golden Boy Promotions CEO Richard Schaefer last week in Golden Boy’s downtown office in Los Angeles, California to discuss his next fight in the summer. Canelo wants to fight on July 26th, according to Dan Rafael of ESPN. However, that’s not really going to work because that falls on the same date as the talked about match-up between Gennady Golovkin and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. on HBO pay-per-view.
Unless the red-haired Canelo was to be fighting an exciting opponent with a real chance of beating him like Erislandy Lara, there’s no way that he could compete with the huge interest that will be there for the Chavez Jr-Golovkin fight. It’s almost impossible to believe that Golden Boy would match Canelo up against a fighter like Lara, because he’s too much like Floyd Mayweather Jr. with his fighting style, and he’d likely pluck Schaefer’s Golden Goose Canelo clean by schooling him like Mayweather did. Canelo went life and death with Austin Trout, a fighter that Lara recently easily beat by a 12 round unanimous decision last December.
So Canelo is going to need to move off the July 26th date and fight in either August or sometime in early July for his fight to get more attention for whoever he’s facing. With Canelo wanting all of his fights to be PPV from this point on, it’s vitally important that he doesn’t have competition from any other fighters or sports when he’s fighting.
“Canelo and his team met with Richard Schaefer a couple of days ago in LA at the GB offices. The plan is for a July fight, supposedly on Showtime PPV,” Dan Rafael said to ESPN. “But the target date has been July 26, which would probably be difficult to pull off if Chavez and GGG go on HBO PPV the week before. So they are discussing dates and opponents. Schaefer said fight could be in Vegas, LA or Texas…He did say Canelo wants to fight this summer and that is what he is working on getting done.
Canelo is going to need to pick a good opponent for his next fight if he wants to bring in high PPV totals. He blew it by picking Alfredo Angulo in his last fight, because that turned out to be a real disappointment due to how Angulo suddenly lost his power in that fight. It’s probable that Canelo will look to fight IBF 154lb champion Carlos Molina. It’s not a great fight because Molina doesn’t have the talent to make it competitive, and he doesn’t have a large fan base to help make a Canelo-Molina fight a big success. It would be a decent fight on ESPN’s Friday Night Fights, but a terrible one for Showtime PPV.
The problem that Canelo has is that there is only three good fighters in the junior middleweight division in Mayweather Jr., Miguel Cotto and Lara. Canelo already lost to Mayweather, so he’s out of the running for his next fight. Canelo has no interest in fighting Lara, so he’s out. And Cotto is already fighting Sergio Martinez in June, and leaves him unavailable. There simply aren’t any other junior middleweights that boxing fans care to see Canelo fight, and he’d be wasting his time with Molina.
If Canelo would move up to the middleweight division for his next fight, he’d have all kinds of high quality opponents for him to fight. With Canelo weighing in his mid-170s for his last fight against Angulo, there’s no reason why Canelo shouldn’t be fighting in the middleweight division against guys his own size instead of him draining down in weight to fight smaller fighters than himself. If Canelo would move to 160, he could fight Daniel Geale, Peter Quillin or Marco Antonio Rubio for his next fight in July or whenever. Those guys would be good opponents.
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