By Tim Fletcher: IBF/IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin’s promoter Tom Loeffler says that he won’t be making a decision about Golovkin’s next fight until the November 21st fight between WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez is decided.
Loeffler is waiting to see if the winner of the Cotto-Canelo fight will agree to fight Golovkin. If not, then Loeffler will need to either schedule Golovkin to face his IBF mandatory challenger Tureano Johnson, or wait and see who HBO has in mind for Golovkin. There aren’t a lot of options for Golovkin unfortunately.
“When you can bring this kind of financial revenue to that fight,” Loeffler said to fightnews.com about Golovkin facing the winner of the Cotto-Canelo fight. “Clearly, Gennady vs. the winner of Canelo vs. Cotto would be the biggest fight in boxing for next year. Gennady’s mission is to collect all the belts. His next fight is based on what happens on November 21st. 21 knockouts in a row and it doesn’t look it’s going to end anytime soon.”
If Cotto beats Canelo, it could be the worst possible thing for Golovkin, because the tiny 5’7” Cotto will likely never agree to fight the 5’10 ½” Golovkin. Cotto won’t want to take a knockout loss to Golovkin this close to his retirement. Cotto has been matched really carefully since Freddie Roach took over as his trainer and since he signed with Roc Nation Sports. Canelo is a huge step up in class for Cotto, but I think that’s about as high that Cotto is going to go unless someone like Manny Pacquiao or Floyd Mayweather Jr decide they want to fight him again.
If Cotto can get past Canelo, I see him taking it really easy in facing carefully selected opponents until he retires. Golovkin is simply too good and too big for Cotto. If Canelo beats Cotto, he’ll probably vacate the WBC title, because his promoter Oscar De La Hoya appears to want to wait a while before he makes the Canelo-Golovkin fight.
It’s possible that De La Hoya feels that the Golovkin vs. Canelo fight will be bigger in the distant future once Golovkin has become a bigger star. It would be like the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao fight.
That fight got much bigger after the two stars waited five years to face each other. By the time Mayweather fought Pacquiao, he was no longer the threat he’d been in 2010. If De La Hoya waits five years before he lets Canelo fight Golovkin, we’ll have Canelo facing a 38-year-old Golovkin. That will give him a better chance of winning, and the fight might be bigger if the two fighters keep winning.
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