By Dan Ambrose: Golden Boy Promotions President Oscar De La Hoya is expecting a huge crowd for the May 2nd or 9th fight between former WBA/WBC light middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (44-1-1, 31 KOs) and James Kirkland (32-1-1, 28 KOs) in Texas.
De La Hoya thinks that as many as 60,000 boxing fans could show up for the fight, which De La Hoya doesn’t quite know where the fight will be taking place. I doubt that many fans will turn out for the Canelo-Kirkland fight. I hope De La Hoya isn’t pinning his hopes in the fight drawing that much, because it might blow his world if only 10,000 to 15,000 boxing fans shown up to purchase what will likely be heavily discounted tickets.
It was thought that the Canelo-Kirkland fight would be staged at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas, but now De La Hoya is saying that he’s not sure where precisely the fight will be taking place.
“It’s an action packed fight where each guy is going to give everything into it. It’s going to be an incredible fight,” De La Hoya said via RingTV.com. “We’re going to have 40,000, 50,000 or 60,000 people somewhere in Texas. Canelo is the future of the sport of boxing. We have Canelo who will be the future of boxing for many years to come,” De La Hoya said.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj0YsgI3xYM
The last time that Canelo fought in Texas was in 2013 he drew 39,472 boxing fans for his fight against Austin Trout at the Aladmodome in San Antonio. For that fight, the tickets were heavily discounted to an extremely low amount in order to try and fill the stadium.
The tickets were very, very cheap to the point where they were as cheap as they could get without them being given away. If that’s the idea that they plan on using for the Canelo-Kirkland then it’s possible that they’ll be able to sell some tickets, but it could be a tad too ambitious on De La Hoya’s part to ask for boxing fans to purchase 60,000 tickets to see him fight Kirkland.
When fans bought a high volume of tickets for Canelo’s fight against Trout in 2013, Canelo was an unbeaten fighter at the time and still thought highly of by his legion of boxing fans. Since then, Canelo has suffered a 12 round decision loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr in 2013 and has a controversial win over Erislandy Lara in 2014.
A lot of fans thought Canelo lost to Lara. The ones that didn’t think Canelo lost the fight thought he looked poor against Lara, and didn’t look like someone who will be the guy that carries the sport of boxing for the next 10 years like De La Hoya seems to think he’ll be doing.
Last year before his bout against Lara, Canelo fought a weight-drained, slow as molasses Alfredo Angulo, who reportedly had to lose over 40+ pounds in a short period of time in order to make weight for their catch-weight fight at 155 pounds.
It could be that De La Hoya is putting too much pressure on Canelo by assuming he’ll be able to draw a huge crowd for the Kirkland fight. After all, this isn’t a great fight that boxing fans are asking for.
Kirkland hasn’t done anything special since 2009, as he’s done prison time and been fighting on an infrequent basis. Asking fans to come to see Canelo fight Kirkland in high numbers is really assuming a lot of the red-headed Canelo.
Comments are closed.