By Dan Ambrose: Golden Boy Promotions president Oscar De La Hoya says he was ready to announce the November 21st mega-fight between Golden Boy’s flagship fighter Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (45-1-1, 32 KOs) against WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (40-4, 33 KOs) yesterday, but the fight negotiations are being held up by Cotto’s adviser Gaby Peñagarícano, De La Hoya said.
The negotiations are stuck on the rematch clause in the contract. De La Hoya thinks that if they can’t agree on the terms of the rematch clause, then they should just scrap the idea and just go with the one fight. That, however, isn’t likely going to fly with Cotto’s management, because a rematch clause is important to them.
“I wanted to announce the fight yesterday,” De La Hoya said via ElNuevoDia.com. “It’s not Cotto because I know Cotto wants the fight. I don’t think Cotto knows what’s going on. It’s his advisor that’s holding up the fight, Gaby Peñagarícano. We haven’t announced the fight because we haven’t agreed on the terms of a rematch clause with Peñagarícano,.”
It seems like a waste of time for Cotto’s management to be fretting over a rematch clause. It’s not as if Canelo won’t want to fight him again. With the kind of money that Canelo is getting for this fight, he’s clearly going to be interested in fighting Cotto a second time if he beats him. It’s not as if Canelo will take off in another direction.
Cotto will have to wait at least one fight anyway if he loses the fight, because Canelo would then be obligated to defend the WBC middleweight title against Gennady Golovkin in his very next fight.
Golovkin is the WBC mandatory challenger and he’s due his title shot. He’s not going to sit back and wait for Cotto and Canelo to fight a second time before he inserts his right to a title shot at the WBC belt. The only way Canelo and Cotto will be able to fight each other a second time in back to back fights is if Canelo or Cotto vacates the WBC title.
That would look really bad if one of those two does that because it would make them look like they’re afraid to get inside the ring with Golovkin and challenge him. Some fans might not care if they chickened out and ducked Golovkin, but enough hardcore fans would know to cause them to lose a lot of fans.
“We all want the fight, Golden Boy, Roc Nation, Cotto Promotions but we haven’t come to an agreement on the percentages. If that’s the problem, we’ll take out the clause,” De La Hoya said. If the first fight is good, we’ll negotiate on good faith. Whoever wins, Cotto or Canelo it doesn’t matter, we’ll renegotiate the rematch in good faith within 30 days.”
I get the feeling that De La Hoya is going to try and push for an immediate rematch between Canelo and Cotto. I think Cotto will go for that idea too. If their bout makes a ton of money, I’m guessing they’ll ignore Golovkin and tell him he can either wait for his turn or look to pick up the title after it’s vacated or stripped.
“We want to break records,” De La Hoya said.
I’m not sure what records that De La Hoya is expecting the Cotto vs. Canelo fight to break. It’s surely not going to break the Floyd Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquiao fight record of the most pay-per-view buys.
De La Hoya should be happy if the Cotto-Canelo fight does even 1 million PPV buys because that’s about the most many people see that fight doing. Neither of these fighters have proven that they can bring in more than 300,000 PPV buys when they’re the A-side. Cotto and Canelo have only brought in big numbers when they were matched against Mayweather or Manny Pacquiao.
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