By Dan Ambrose: Golden Boy promotions president Oscar De La Hoya and HBO Sports president Ken Hershman will be announcing the signing of Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (44-1-1, 31 KOs) to HBO today in a press conference. It’s unclear for how many years the 24-year-old Canelo’s contract will be with HBO, but you can assume it’s going to be at least 2 years.
HBO is betting that Canelo will be able to look as good as he did before his loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr and his less than impressive performances against Austin Trout and Erislandy Lara. This is obviously a gamble on HBO’s part because Canelo has a lot of question marks around his ability after his last fight against Lara.
The last thing that HBO needs is a fighter signed to a long-term contract that needs to be maneuvered carefully to keep him from getting beaten.
In addition to the announcement of Canelo signing with HBO, De La Hoya will be announcing Canelo’s next fight for December 6th against 36-year-old Joshua Clottey. That’s the opponent that Canelo and Golden Boy have selected after months of searching for just the right guy for the red-haired Canelo.
Canelo and Golden Boy passed up the option of taking on much bigger but arguably much more dangerous opponents such as Demetrius Andrade, Lara, and James Kirkland. It’s hard to know why they decided on Clottey, because he’s up there in age and he’s not exactly been the most active of fighters in the last 4 years since he got a big payday against Manny Pacquiao in 2010.
De La Hoya has obviously picked out Clottey because he’s recognizable to the older hardcore boxing fans. The fans that have been following the sport for years will know who Clottey is, but the newer fans won’t have any idea who he is because his fights haven’t been televised on HBO since 2010. But mostly, Clottey provides another beatable fighter for Canelo to defeat without the risk of him losing. We saw how Canelo was matched against Alfredo Angulo earlier this year.
Angulo was coming off of a knockout loss to Lara and yet he was still selected to fight Canelo. Angulo was a name that hardcore boxing fans were familiar with, but he was also someone who presented little threat to Canelo due to his lack of hand speed and his plodding style of fighting.
By switching Canelo from Showtime to HBO, he’ll have the opportunity to fight in front of bigger audiences due to HBO’s bigger subscription base. This could mean that Canelo will be able to go back to fighting on pay-per-view when facing guys in the class of Clottey and Angulo.
Canelo didn’t bring in big PPV numbers for his fights against Angulo and Lara on Showtime PPV. Each of those fights brought in a little over 300,000 PPV buys. But with Canelo on HBO, it might be possible for him to draw bigger numbers for his mismatches. You would hope that his fight against Clottey wouldn’t be a PPV bout because it’s a pretty horrible match-up, but you just can’t tell. They may take advantage of HBO’s wider subscription base to make the Canelo-Clottey fight a PPV one instead of having it televised on regular HBO.
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