De La Hoya can forget Cotto-Canelo rematch

By Boxing News - 11/22/2015 - Comments

cotto444By Dan Ambrose: Saul “Canelo” Alvarez’s promoter Oscar De La Hoya has been saying for weeks now that boxing fans shouldn’t push Canelo to fight Gennady Golovkin because Canelo’s fight against Miguel Cotto (40-5, 33 KOs) might be competitive or it might bring in a ton of pay-per-view buys on HBO.

Now that we know that the fight wasn’t competitive tonight after Canelo’s easy win over a much lighter looking Cotto, it pretty much undercuts any argument that De La Hoya has for pushing for an immediate rematch between the two fighters. Now the only reason why De La Hoya can make an argument for a second Cotto-Canelo fight is if the fight brought in a mess of PPV buys. But I think it would be a stupid idea for De La Hoya to match Canelo up against Cotto again, because after tonight’s fight, it’s pretty clear that Canelo is a full middleweight and was fighting a pumped up welterweight in 35-year-old Cotto, and an old one at that.

Canelo needs to fight guys his own size for a change, starting with Golovkin. If De La Hoya starts slathering on the compliments up and down Canelo’s backside tonight to justify a rematch with Cotto, then the boxing public needs to speak up and resist De La Hoya’s notion.

I kind of get the impression that the last thing that De La Hoya wants is to throw Canelo to the wolves by putting him in with Golovkin. You can make an argument that Canelo is little more than the 2015’s version of Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. with the way that Canelo can melt down in weight to fight at a weight that is much lower than his natural weight, and then rehydrate up to the 170s or perhaps even the 180s to fight.

We don’t know what Canelo weighed tonight because there wasn’t a weight given for him, but he looked to me to be at an all-time high in the weight department. Canelo easily won the fight by a 12 round unanimous decision by the scores of 117-111, 119-109 and 118-110. However, he looked to me like a short super middleweight. If you compare Canelo to WBO super middleweight champion Arthur Abraham, who fought earlier today, I think Canelo looked bigger than Abraham. That kind of tells you a little bit about Canelo’s gift for dehydrating to make weight and then rehydrating to come in as a huge fighter.

I have a strong feeling that De La Hoya is going to be crying for a Cotto vs. Canelo rematch tonight at the post-fight press conference. I don’t know how De La Hoya can justify trying to crap another Cotto-Canelo mismatch down the boxing public’s throat, but that’s what I think he’ll be doing.

Canelo may have misspoke when he was being interviewed after the fight tonight when he said he was willing to fight Golovkin. I think De La Hoya is going to nix that idea by either putting Canelo back in with Cotto or having him fight Top Rank promoter Bob Arum’s little welterweight fighters in Tim Bradley or Manny Pacquiao. I can just picture the size difference between the truck=sized Canelo and the tiny 5’6″ Pacquiao. Talk about a mismatch.



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