By Tim Fletcher: Former IBF middleweight champion David Lemieux (34-3, 31 KOs) will be back inside the ring in three months from now against an opponent still to be determined, according to Dan Rafael.
Lemieux, 27, lost his IBF title to WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin last October in losing by an 8th round knockout on HBO pay-per-view. Lemieux, #6 IBF, #7 WBC, showed a lot of courage in choosing to face Golovkin in the unification fight rather than sitting back and milking his IBF title like many champions would have done if they were in a similar situation.
Lemieux got a good payday for the Golovkin fight, but nothing like the money he would have made had he milked his title against the IBF’s weak top 15 contenders.
Lemieux’s promoter Camille Estephan said to ESPN.com “March will be his next fight, but we do not have a date yet,” Estephan said. “David has been on holiday but came back to the gym two weeks ago. He will start camp in January. David is still young [27] and I expect many more things from David,” Estephan said.
With Lemieux coming back in March, it means that he won’t be facing WBC middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez in his next fight on May 7th in Las Vegas, Nevada. That probably will not make Lemieux’s co-promoters at Golden Boy Promotions too happy, because I think they would not mind matching Lemieux vs. Canelo in May.
The only way that Lemieux could face Canelo in May is if Lemieux gets through his next opponent in March without taking much punishment. Even then, I think Golden Boy will instead choose to have Lemieux build himself back up before they look to match him up with Canelo.
Lemieux’s fight in March will be on HBO, according to Rafael, because they owe him one more fight on their network. There looking at the fight taking place in Montreal, Canada. With the fight being on HBO, it will likely need to be someone halfway decent for the network to approve the fight. They’re going to expect quality.
Fortunately for Lemieux, he has the kind of punching power and talent that will enable him to beat a lot of the top 15 contenders in the division. He shouldn’t have any problem beating a good fighter as long as he fights more aggressively than he did against Golovkin. Lemieux is still a very good fighter. He just ran into the best guy at 160 in Golovkin, and he had a bad fight strategy in how to beat him.
Lemieux talked a lot before his fight with Golovkin about how he was going to attack the Kazakhstan fighter and beat him with his youth. Unfortunately for Lemieux, he fought passively by not going after him and that was a major problem. If Lemieux had pressed the attack more, he might have had a chance to win.
Golovkin was there to be hit, but Lemieux wasted time by trying to box him instead of going after him the way he had talked about. It looked like Lemieux came into the fight with a poor game plan by thinking he could box Golovkin, and instead of making adjustments, Lemieux stuck with the game plan the entire fight and wound up getting easily beaten. They could have pulled the plug on the fight as early as the 6th round because Lemieux wasn’t even trying to win. He was just standing on the outside eating jabs all night long.
There are some good opponents that would be perfect for Lemieux to fight. He would do well against Dominic Wade, Sam Soliman, 14. Antoine Douglas or Eamonn O’Kane. Tureano Johnson recently defeated O’Kane by a 12 round decision fairly easily. O’Kane would be a good opponent for Lemieux if his promoters at Golden Boy and Eye of the Tiger had faith that he could win the fight.
Lemieux might need a confidence booster right now after the way that he was beaten by Golovkin. If they want to go that round, then they can select one of the bottom ranked contenders like Adam Etches, John Ryder, Nick Blackwell, Ievgen Khytrov, or Akio Shibata. Lemieux would also do well against some of the junior middleweight contenders if they could get one move up in weight to face him at 160. Lemieux can’t move down in weight because he’s too heavy. It would have to be at 160.
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