Mayweather: De La Hoya is just hoping Canelo beats Cotto

By Boxing News - 11/17/2015 - Comments

delahoya5By Chris Williams: Floyd Mayweather Jr. thinks that Saul “Canelo” Alvarez could have a tough time this Saturday night trying to beat Miguel Cotto in their HBO televised fight on PPV. Mayweather sees Canelo’s promoter Oscar De La Hoya hoping that Canelo, 25, can get past Cotto.

Mayweather isn’t too happy with De La Hoya after some of the recent comments he made about him in an interview with Playboy Magazine. De La Hoya made light of Mayweather’s accomplishments in beating Canelo two years ago by saying that Canelo was weight drained at the time due to the 152lb catch-weight for the fight, and that Canelo was too young to be fighting a star like Mayweather.

Canelo was 23 at the time of the fight. Mayweather thinks that De La Hoya is a bad promoter by letting Canelo take the fight with him at such a young age.

“At the end of the day, he’s [De La Hoya] just hoping Canelo wins, because Cotto is no easy task. I’ve been in there with Cotto,” Mayweather said to mlive.com. “I think he’s [De La Hoya] jealous. If Miguel Cotto was my fighter, if Canelo was my fighter, they’d be a lot bigger now. He [De La Hoya] said Canelo was too young. Well, that shows you how he does bad business by putting a kid that’s too young in there. You want the big reward, you’ve got to take risk. That’s what we do.”

De La Hoya definitely doesn’t know if Canelo can beat the 35-year-old Cotto on Saturday, because this is truly a 50-50 fight. But at Canelo’s age, he should be up to the task. De La Hoya can’t blame another Canelo loss on his age or him being weight drained, because he’s now older and he’s fighting at his favorite weight spot at 155 on Saturday night.

If Canelo loses the fight to Cotto, then De La Hoya is going to need to come up with some ideas for what to do with Canelo. He can’t move him back down to 154lb, because it’s obvious that Canelo is struggling to make the weight class. Don’t you think that if Canelo could make junior middleweight, he would be fighting at 154?

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Canelo will have to move up to middleweight officially. That means De La Hoya will need to target one of the weaker champions in the division like Daniel Jacobs, the WBA “regular” middleweight champion, or WBO champ Andy Lee for Canelo. Those are fights that Canelo can surely win if De La Hoya can get him one of them.

It’ll be a big blow for De La Hoya to see Canelo losing yet again. There wouldn’t be the same cover this time that he had for his previous win against Mayweather, because Cotto isn’t seen in the same class as Mayweather. If Canelo can’t beat Cotto, then you can reason that he certainly wouldn’t beat Gennady Golovkin either. De La Hoya would be in a tough situation with his best fighter [Canelo] in his Golden Boy stable being devalued due to losses to Mayweather and Cotto. Could De La Hoya build Canelo back up to where he was before his losses to Mayweather and Cotto? I’d say probably not. Canelo will become another David Lemieux if he loses to Cotto. In other words, Canelo will be seen as a flawed fighter with a good punch, but who can’t beat the best fighters.



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