By Dan Ambrose: Oscar De La Hoya was told by his willful fighter Saul “Canelo” Alvarez to break off negotiations with Miguel Cotto on Saturday due to Cotto having missed a deadline that Canelo and Golden Boy set for him to decide on whether he will agree to the contract negotiations that they’d set.
De La Hoya now is looking to find an opponent for the 24-year-old Canelo to fight next. Surprisingly, Canelo is still determined to fight on May 2nd, even if it means competing against a fight as big as Floyd Mayweather Jr vs. Cotto.
De La Hoya has several options he’s looking at matching against Canelo. He’s not saying who those guys are, but two of them are rumored to be David Lemieux and James Kirkland. The third is possibly Tim Bradley, who was mentioned last week as someone that Top Rank promoter Bob Arum would be interested in matching against Canelo.
“There are several opponents, so it depends on what opponent we choose, then we’ll decide if it’s pay-per-view or HBO,” De La Hoya said via Dan Rafael of ESPN.com.
They’re looking at bringing Canelo to either Texas or Las Vegas, Nevada for his next fight.
If it takes place in Texas then they’ll stage it at the Alamodome in San Antonio. This is where Canelo won a controversial decision over Austin Trout in 2013 in fighting in front of 40,000 fans. They figure that if Canelo was able to draw that many fans once then he’ll be able to do it a second time. However, the tickets were deeply discounted to make it easier for the local boxing fans to purchase them, and it’s unclear whether they would need to do this a second time in order to sell a ton of tickets. Additionally, at the time, Canelo was still unbeaten and he hadn’t yet lost to Mayweather, and he hadn’t faced Erislandy Lara in their controversial bout.
It’s pretty clear that Canelo’s stock has dropped off badly in the last two years since his fights with Lara, Trout and Mayweather. The fans that were eager to see the unbeaten Canelo might not be as willing now that he’s been brought down to earth by Trout, Lara and Mayweather. Canelo arguably lost all three fights, but was given decisions in the Trout and Lara fights.
Canelo probably should have stuck out the negotiations for the Cotto fight, because nothing that De La Hoya can dig up for him now will pay the kind of money that he’d have made against Cotto. More than that though there’s a danger in Canelo fighting Lemieux or Kirkland. I’m sure De La Hoya sees them as beatable, but you can never know with Canelo because he’s pretty flawed. He could very well lose to both of those guys.
We do know that De La Hoya won’t match Canelo against Gennady Golovkin, even though Golovkin will be free for May to fight him. They’re both the same size and same weight, so it doesn’t make sense that De La Hoya wouldn’t match Canelo up against Golovkin. However, Golovkin is really good, and good enough to take the judges of the equation completely. So instead of the more popular Canelo winning another controversial decision in a fight that he appeared to lose, he could end up taking a beating and getting knocked out by Golovkin. That’s why I don’t see De La Hoya letting Canelo fight the Kazahksan fighter.
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