By Dan Ambrose: Speaking for former WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (45-1-1, 32 KOs), Bernard Hopkins says that Canelo will definitely fight the winner of the October 17th fight between IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (33-0, 30 KOs) and IBF 160lb champion David Lemieux (34-2, 31 KOs) in 2016.
Hopkins says the losers of the Golovkin-Lemieux and Cotto-Canelo fights should face each other. Whether that happens or not is unclear. Unfortunately, it’s not even a given that the winner of the two fights will face each other.
Thus far, we only know that Golovkin and Lemieux have great interest in fighting the winner of the Cotto vs. Canelo fight. But on the flipside, we don’t know that Canelo and Cotto have interest in fighting Golovkin or Lemieux. They haven’t been vocal about what their feelings are about jumping into the ring with those two punchers.
We do know that Cotto started stuttering when asked by Max Kellerman of HBO whether he’d be interested in facing Golovkin. With Canelo, Golden Boy Promotions CEO Oscar De La Hoya has been all over the board with comments about he will or won’t take the fight with GGG.
At this time it’s unknown if Canelo would agree to the fight if Golovkin emerges as the winner. My guess is Canelo will agree to fight the Golovkin-Lemieux winner if it’s Lemieux that wins, but if Golovkin comes out on top, I’m not sure that he’ll take the fight.
“Both of them said they can do it. It makes sense,” Hopkins said via Fighthype. “It would happen that year, and that year would be 2016. The winner of these two matches coming up. The winner of both of those matches should fight each other. The loser of both of those matches should fight each other.”
I don’t think Hopkins calls the shots for Canelo, and he definitely doesn’t call the shots for Cotto, who is promoted by Roc Nation Sports. It’s hard to say what Canelo will do if he beats Cotto. I personally don’t think Canelo will get anywhere near Golovkin if he blasts out Lemieux in a devastating fashion in two or three rounds.
If it’s an easy fight for Golovkin to where he looks like a monster, I see Canelo veering around him and waiting him out for two to three years while he ages enough to become beatable. You have to remember that Golovkin 33 now, and De La Hoya already said that he wants to wait two more years before letting Canelo fight him.
If Golovkin goes life and death with Lemieux and barely wins after getting knocked down two to four times, then I think Canelo will choose to face him in his next fight in 2016. In other words, Golovkin has to show vulnerability and look like he’s susceptible to losing before I see Canelo agreeing to fight him.
You have to remember that Canelo has tons of options to make big money. De La Hoya can trot out Alfredo Angulo again and Canelo would still make big money fighting him for a second time, even though no one would ever want to see him take on a fighter of that caliber again.
Canelo can fight guys like Joshua Clottey, and some of the welterweights and make good money. If De La Hoya can line up a welterweight for Canelo to fight, he’d enjoy a tremendous weight advantage over the guy. If Canelo walks into the ring at 175 facing a guy that is in his mid-150s to upper 150s, Canelo would be outweighing the guy by 17-20 pounds. It would be like Canelo vs. Josesito Lopez all over again. We’re talking massacre.
It’s too bad that Hopkins doesn’t call the shots for Canelo because it would be nice to see him fight Golovkin in 2016 rather than wait him out until he ages more and starts nearing 40. Golovkin is going to continue to grow in popularity even if Canelo and/or Cotto avoid him for the remainder of their careers.
Golovkin will make it to the top regardless. He’s going to pick up a lot of news boxing fans if he destroys Lemieux, and with a winner of him, he’ll increase his chances of being able to fight guys like WBO champion Andy Lee or Billy Joe Saunders.
Obviously, there will be no chance of Golovkin fighting guys like Peter Quillin or Daniel Jacobs, because I don’t think their adviser Al Haymon would ever give the green light to them entering the ring with Golovkin, because it’s a terrible match-up for them no matter how long they wait.
Golovkin isn’t going to lose his punching power even into his early 40s. He might lose his reflexes but his punching power will remain enormous. If you put Quillin and Jacobs in with Golovkin, I think it would be a massive slaughter. We’ve already see Quillin and Jacobs taste the canvas before in the past against opposition with less power than Golovkin.
Canelo has taken some tough tests in the past in facing Floyd Mayweather Jr., Erislandy Lara and Austin Trout and he arguably lost all three of those fights I the minds of a lot of boxing fans. But we haven’t seen Canelo fight Demetrius Andrade or Jermall Charlo, the big punching Charlo brother.
We haven’t seen Canelo fight any of the middleweights, even though Canelo is basically a big middleweight at 175. There are some middleweights that rehydrate higher in weight than Canelo, as we saw recently with Daniel Geale, who rehydrated to 183 for his fight against Cotto last June. But we haven’t seen Canelo fight against middleweights until now with him fighting Cotto at a catch-weight of 155lbs rather than at the full weight for the middleweight division.
Cotto is a small middleweight. He says he’s not a middleweight, but he clearly is one. He’s just a small one. The fact that it’s taken Canelo this long to start facing guys from his own weight class, it just shows that he’s not appeared to be too anxious to fight guys his own size like Golovkin. Canelo has been facing guys that he enjoys a weight advantage over.
Whether Canelo will want to give up that weight advantage to fight Golovkin or other normal to big sized middleweights remains to be seen. What we do know is Canelo hasn’t fought at junior middleweight for two solid years since his loss to Mayweather in 2013. Since then, Cotto has fought three times at middleweight using his catch-weight of 155lbs, which is in the middleweight division.
The Cotto fight will be Canelo’s fourth straight fight at middleweight. If Canelo wins the WBC middleweight title, you can expect him to continue with the catch-weights at 155, and that would likely mean that Golovkin would have to agree to fight him at 155 if he wanted a fight against him.
If Golovkin says no to the catch-weight, my guess is Canelo will vacate the WBC title, because he can’t force Golovkin to fight at a catch-weight because he’s the WBC mandatory challenger. A champion can only pressure voluntary contenders to accept a fight at a catch-weight or else they don’t get the shot at the title.
Comments are closed.