(Photo Credit:Ed Mulholland/Golden Boy/Golden Boy via Getty Images) By Scott Gilfoid: Golden Boy Promotions President Oscar De La Hoya is hoping that superstar Floyd Mayweather Jr. (48-0, 26 KOs) will grant his fighter Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (45-1-1, 32 KOs) a rematch in the near future before Mayweather steps away from the game.
De La Hoya didn’t say when he would like the Mayweather-Canelo rematch to take place, but it would seem likely that De La Hoya would jump at the chance to make the fight next September if that’s going to be the last fight of Mayweather’s career.
De La Hoya is interested in matching the 24-year-old Canelo up against WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto next in what would likely be a catch-weight type fight, but it’s unclear if that fight can be made. Even if it does get made, Cotto-Canelo isn’t the money maker that Mayweather-Canelo is.
Cotto is seen by a lot of boxing fans as a paper champion at middleweight, as the guy that many fans see as the real world champion at 160 is Gennady Golovkin. If Mayweather’s last fight is going to take place in September, then De La Hoya will need to try and make that fight for his golden goose Canelo because it will be the last shot that he has at fighting Mayweather.
When asked if he thinks that Mayweather will fight Canelo again, De La Hoya said “I don’t know. I hope he would. Canelo, he has told me many times over, he is willing to fight anybody. I believe that at the age of 24, the future is more than bright for him. He literally has the world by his hands and the skies the limit for him,” De La Hoya said.
Mayweather defeated Canelo two years ago by a 12 round unanimous decision by the scores of 116-112, 114-114 and 117-111. The fight brought in 2.2 million pay-per-view buys, and came close to equaling the all-time PPV mark set by Mayweather vs. De La Hoya in 2007 when the two of them brought in 2.4 million PPV buys. Mayweather beat the red-haired Canelo by a clear decision in that fight, but Canelo has since seemed unhappy because of the 152 pound catch-weight that he agreed to for the fight.
One thing that could get in the way of a Mayweather-Canelo 2 rematch might be if Canelo feels that he deserves to call the shots because of his three-fight winning streak against Alfredo Angulo, Erislandy Lara and James Kirkland. At the post-fight press conference last Saturday night, a testy-sounding Canelo said that he would never fight Mayweather ever again at a catch-weight. Mayweather obviously hasn’t asked him to, but with the way that Canelo said he wouldn’t fight Mayweather at a catch-weight in the future, it could make it difficult to negotiate a fight between them if Canelo also starts asking for a much bigger slice of the revenue in a second fight.
One could understand Canelo asking for more if he’d beaten some solid fighters since his loss to Mayweather, but Canelo’s win over Erislandy Lara last year was a controversial win for Canelo with many fans seeing him having lost that fight. Canelo’s other fights have come against lesser opposition in Alfredo Angulo and Kirkland. Canelo’s resume doesn’t show that he’s done anything special since his loss to Mayweather. You would have to think that a second fight between Mayweather and Canelo would have the exact same financial terms as the first fight if not more slanted in Mayweather’s favor because of his previous win over Canelo and his recent victory over Manny Pacquiao.
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