By Dan Ambrose: Despite the Floyd Mayweather Jr vs. Manny Pacquiao fight likely to get made for May 2nd, Golden Boy Promotions President Oscar de La Hoya is still saying that he’s going to have his fighter Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (44-1-1, 31 KOs) fight the inactive James Kirkland (32-1, 28 KOs) on the same night unless Mayweather and Pacquiao actually takes place.
De La Hoya says Canelo-Kirkland fight will take place on 5/2 if Mayweather fights anyone else but Pacquiao. This means that De La Hoya and Canelo are willing to risk getting low ratings for his fight against Kirkland.
This obviously isn’t the smartest thing to do if your goal is to make the 24-year-old Canelo more popular, because right now he’s proven that he doesn’t have the popularity to bring in big pay-per-view numbers like Pacquiao and Mayweather.
The reason for Canelo’s lack of popularity, besides him losing to Mayweather and arguably losing to Austin Trout and Erislandy Lara, is he’s not been seen by enough casual boxing fans for him to take off. With De La Hoya and Canelo willing to risk being seen by many less people by trying to compete with Mayweather, it shows you that there’s a problem with the scheduling of his fights.
You can’t blame De La Hoya because he’s just following instructions given to him by Canelo, but you’d like to think that De La Hoya would have sat the red-headed Canelo down to explain to him that he’s actually hurting himself more than he is Mayweather by trying to bump him off of the Mexican holiday fight dates. Having an inexperienced fighter telling him what to do probably isn’t a brilliant move.
Canelo doesn’t have the popularity yet to do that, and if he keeps trying to compete with Mayweather, then there’s a strong chance that he may never become a big PPV attraction.
“I want to be very clear and straightforward about that,” De La Hoya said via Kevin Iole of sports.yahoo.com. “Canelo is fighting on May 2. Period. Now, if the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight happens, that’s the fight we’ll move for, and we have May 9 on hold for that. But that’s it. Otherwise, no matter what else may go on on May 2, Canelo will be fighting Kirkland in Texas on that date. You can bank on it.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThoKpCEFASE
De La Hoya obviously doesn’t want to upset Canelo by telling him that he’s potentially sabotaging his own career by trying to compete with Mayweather for his fight dates. You can imagine it would be a huge blow to De La Hoya and Golden Boy if Canelo worked himself up to an anger at De La Hoya telling him that it’s not a good idea to try and bump Mayweather from the Mexican holiday fight dates.
If Canelo bails on Golden Boy, it would be a tremendous loss to his company due to Canelo being his flagship fighter. It doesn’t matter that Canelo has already been exposed by Trout, Lara and Mayweather, it would still be a major blow for De La Hoya and Golden Boy to lose him.
Canelo is fighting Kirkland at a catch-weight of 155 pounds. This is the third straight time that Canelo has fought at a catch-weight above the junior middleweight division. There’s some boxing fans who think Canelo can no longer make the junior middleweight division, but rather than move up to middleweight and immediately have pressure put on him to fight Gennady Golovkin, Canelo is artificially staying at junior middleweight by fighting in his own self-designed division at 155.
One has to wonder how long it’ll take before that catch-weight goes up to 156, 157 and 158. It’s kind of funny that Canelo keeps doing this rather than just taking the pain and fighting at middleweight for better or worse. If he gets smashed by Golovkin, then so be it. It’s not as if he hasn’t already been exposed in the past by different opponents.
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