By Dan Ambrose: Golden Boy Promotions made a key acquisition to their growing stable of fighters on Friday in signing #2 WBC, #3 WBO, #5 IBF, #13 WBA middleweight contender David Lemieux (33-2, 31 KOs) to their team. The news was leaked a couple of weeks ago, but the signing was made official today with Golden Boy adding the 26-year-old Canadian Lemieux to their team.
Lemieux is probably still too green to snatch the middleweight titles from champions like Miguel Cotto, Gennady Golovkin, Daniel Jacobs and Jermain Taylor.
Lemieux is young enough to wait out most of those guys and then swoop in and snatch one or more of the world titles and sit on it for a short spell depending on the match-making Golden Boy does for him.
Lemieux recently stopped former world title challenger Gabriel Rosado in the 10th round last December. It was one of Lemieux’s more impressive performances of his eight year career. In out-slugging Rosado, Lemieux showed a certain ruggedness that he’ll need if he’s to compete with the likes of Golovkin, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, Cotto, Andy Lee, Taylor and Jacobs.
Better yet, Lemieux’s stamina looked good in that fight, as he didn’t run out of gas like he’d done in his losses to Joachim Alcine and Marco Antonio Rubio. However, there are still major question marks about whether Lemieux can hang with the upper bracket of middleweights or not.
That’ll be found out soon enough because we could see Lemieux soon in with Canelo Alvarez in the near future, especially if Canelo is unable to land a big fight against Cotto. Golden Boy will need to match Canelo up in order to keep moving his pay-per-view numbers upwards. We’ve found out that Canelo doesn’t do so well against boxers, so you can expect Golden Boy to trot out Lemieux for Canelo to fight.
Golovkin would be the perfect fight for Lemieux, but it’s doubtful that Golden Boy will feed Lemieux to Golovkin at this time, even though the fight would make a lot of money. Golovkin is just too good right now, and he’d likely ruin Lemieux by chopping him apart in the same way Rubio did in his knockout win over Lemieux back in 2011. You can bet that De La Hoya will steer Lemieux around Golovkin until the Kazakhstan fighter starts showing signs of age.
“David Lemieux is the ideal Golden Boy fighter — a power puncher who is exciting for fans to watch and willing to take on anyone in the division,” Golden Boy Promotions president Oscar De La Hoya said via Dan Rafael of ESPN.com. “As the calendar turns to 2015 and Golden Boy further focuses on delivering the fights that fans want to see, David Lemieux will fit right in with our stable of new fighters.”
Lemieux is the biggest addition to Golden Boy’s team in recent times. Golden Boy added 12 new fighters not long ago, but none of them were in the class of Lemieux.
With Golden Boy’s deep pockets, they should be able to continue to compete for the best fighters in the sport.
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