De La Hoya hoping Lemieux vs. N’Dam to be televised in U.S

By Boxing News - 05/20/2015 - Comments

lemieux55By Dan Ambrose: Golden Boy Promotions President Oscar De La Hoya says he’s looking for a way to televise next month’s clash between #1 IBF Hassan N’Dam (31-1, 18 KOs) and David Lemieux (33-2, 31 KOs) on June 20th. The fight between N’Dam and Lemieux will take place at the Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada. The vacant IBF middleweight title will be on the line for the fight.

HBO won’t be televising it, according to Fight News because they opted not to show it for some reason. The Lemieux-N’Dam fight is on PPV in Quebec, where Lemieux has a large fan base.

That obviously wouldn’t fly in the United States because Lemieux is an unknown as far as the casual boxing fans go. They don’t know who the guy is, and a fight against another unknown in N’Dam likely won’t bring in good ratings for a major network like HBO. Those guys would need to face someone like Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, Miguel Cotto or Gennady Golovkin for them to be involved in a telecast that brings in good ratings.

“It will be on US TV, absolutely,” De La Hoya said via Dan Rafael of ESPN.

De La Hoya is trying to work something out to have the Lemieux-N’Dam fight shown to American fans. But with HBO not agreeing to televise the fight, it might wind up on a smaller channel. It’s a decent fight. HBO might be thinking of how much of a runner N’Dam is, because otherwise it’s a fairly good fight for them or another network to televise.

N’Dam did a lot of movement in his recent 12 round unanimous decision win over Curtis Stevens last October, but he was still able to knock Stevens down in the process of getting the win. What makes the Lemieux vs. N’Dam fight a potentially bad one is how easily Peter Quillin was able to knock N’Dam down in their fight in 2012. Quillin knocked N’Dam down six times in the fight in beating him by a 12 round unanimous decision.

“I will do all the damage,” Lemieux said.

Lemieux, 26, has a very good chance of scoring a knockout over N’Dam if he can catch up to him. He’s going to need to cut off the ring on N’Dam for him to get the KO because N’Dam will move all night long in order to avoid getting hit. That’s one reason why the fight might not be a crowd-pleasing fight. N’Dam is capable of moving for three minutes of every round when he wants to. I don’t know that he’s going to be able to get away from Lemieux though because he’s going to catch up to him sooner or later.



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