Roach: Cotto-Canelo winner should fight Golovkin down the line

By Boxing News - 08/27/2015 - Comments

Image: Roach: Cotto-Canelo winner should fight Golovkin down the lineBy Dan Ambrose: Freddie Roach, the trainer for WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (40-4, 33 KOs) says that winner of the November 21st fight between Cotto and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (45-1-1, 32 KOs) will eventually get around to fighting the WBC mandatory challenger Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (33-0, 30 KOs) in the future.

Roach wouldn’t say when that time will be. All he could do is say that the winner of the Cotto vs. Canelo fight will eventually fight Golovkin in the future. Unfortunately for Golovkin, this ties in with what Canelo’s promoter Oscar De La Hoya has been saying. De La Hoya says he doesn’t know what’s going to happen with the Cotto-Canelo fight.

De La Hoya thinks that the two fighters could wind up facing each other three straight times. In the meantime, Golovkin would be on the sidelines, waiting for the word for when one of the two will be free to fight him. I think it’s pretty clear that Golovkin isn’t going to get a fight against the winner of the Cotto-Canelo fight, and he likely won’t get a chance to fight either of them for quite some time.

“I like how he [Cotto] kind of outshined him [Golovkin] a little [against Daniel Geale], but everyone’s talking about how great he [Golovkin] is,” Roach said via esnewsreporting.com. “But I think the winner of this fight [Cotto vs. Canelo] should fight him, maybe down the line. Right now, we have a tough guy [Canelo] to worry about first, and we’ll go from there,” said Roach.

Roach doesn’t have any say so for either Cotto or Canelo. He’s just a trainer. If Cotto decides he doesn’t want to fight Golovkin after the Canelo fight, then that’s just the way it’s going to be.

Roach won’t be able to pressure Cotto to fight Golovkin and of course he won’t be able to tell Canelo that he should do the right thing and fight Golovkin. If Roach tried to lecture Canelo about who he should fight after the Cotto fight, he’d likely be speaking to a stone wall. Canelo will fight whoever he and his promoter De La Hoya want to fight. That’s just the way it’s going to be.

Golovkin has a fight coming up two months from now against David Lemieux on October 17th. It would be in Golovkin’s best interest for him to look to face Lemieux at least twice so that he can be assured of having a popular opponent for two fights. If Golovkin destroys Lemieux and then moves on to start facing the obscure opposition that he’d been facing, it’s not going to be good for his career.

In the best possible world, Golovkin would be getting a fight against the winner of the Cotto-Canelo fight, but that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. I don’t think for a second that Golovkin is going to be able to get guys like Andy Lee to fight him unless his fight or fights against Lemieux brings in a lot of pay-per-view buys on HBO.

If Golovkin can bring in a lot of money, then I think he has a good chance of getting the likes of Lee to fight him. But it won’t help him get Canelo or Cotto to fight him, because those two fighters can make more money fighting each other over and over again instead of fighting Golovkin. With Canelo and Cotto ignoring Golovkin, I think it’s going to lead to a lot of pressure being put on Golovkin for him to move up in weight to 168 to fight Andre Ward at the full weight for the super middleweight division. Ward wants the fight, but he can’t fight at a catch-weight of 164 pounds. This means that if Golovkin wants to continue to increase his popularity, he’s going to need to move up to 168 and fight Ward, because it looks like he’s going to be put on the ignore list by Cotto and Canelo.

I believe that the only fighters that can interrupt a Cotto-Canelo rematch cycle are Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao. If one of those two guys showed interest in facing the winner or the loser of the Cotto-Canelo fight, then I see them facing one of them, and then going back to facing each other again.



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