Mayweather says he could stop Canelo-Khan if he fought Danny Garcia

By Boxing News - 02/15/2016 - Comments

floyd111By Allan Fox: Floyd Mayweather Jr. thinks that he could effectively cause the May 7 fight between WBC middleweight Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Amir Khan to grind to a crashing halt if he were to come out of retirement and sign up WBC welterweight champion Danny Garcia for a fight on the same date and stage the fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The Canelo-Khan fight will be televised on HBO Championship Boxing and taking place at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. If Mayweather were to come back for a fight against Danny Garcia on the same date as Canelo vs. Khan, it would likely be televised on Showtime if Mayweather were to renew his contract with the network.

However, I’m not sure that Mayweather-Garcia would be a big enough fight to take significant business from Canelo-Khan. The problem is Mayweather burned a lot of his bridges with his overpriced fight against Manny Pacquiao last year in May.

Mayweather then compounded his problems by following that up with a terrible mismatch against a way past his best 32-year-old Andre Berto in a fight last September. Sadly, that fight was sold on Showtime PPV rather than given away for free to the boxing public.

“You know, I can easily put a halt on that fight [Canelo-Khan] if I chose to call Mr. Garcia, [Danny],” Mayweather said to Fighthype.com. “he’s an undefeated champion, I’m an undefeated champion…it would be good for me to come back for number 50 and fight the undefeated Danny Garcia, you know, at the MGM Grand.’ You know, since Danny Garcia is undefeated and he’s very explosive, he’s a very good fighter. I’ll go over to the MGM Grand and say, ‘You know what? We need a venue also,’ and we’ll see.”

I don’t think Mayweather vs. Danny Garcia would take away that much business from a Canelo vs. Khan fight. I think it would take a much bigger fight for Mayweather to shut down the Canelo-Khan fight. Danny Garcia isn’t a big enough name to take away business from the Canelo-Khan fight. Garcia almost lost his last fight to Robert Guerrero last January.

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Garcia looked really bad in that fight. He won the vacant WBC welterweight title, but the fight showed that Garcia is little more than a paper champion in the minds of a lot of fans. Further, the fight showed that Garcia is not going to hold onto the WBC title for very long. Garcia will hold onto the belt as long as his manager Al Haymon carefully matches him. Once someone good like Errol Spence Jr, Shawn Porter, or Keith Thurman fights him, I think he’s going to lose his WBC title.

For Mayweather to grind the Canelo-Khan fight to a halt, he’d need to fight Gennady Golovkin. That’s not going to happen though, because Mayweather wouldn’t ever agree to fight a knockout artist like Golovkin. He couldn’t fight Golovkin on May 7 anyway because it would have to be shown on HBO because that’s who Golovkin has a contract with. Canelo already has HBO locked up for May 7.

With the way that Mayweather is talking about how he thinks he could put a stop to the Canelo-Khan fight, it makes you wonder whether there is some jealousy on the part of Mayweather at all the attention the fight is getting. Mayweather’s fight against Canelo in 2013 brought in 2.2 million buys. While no one is saying that the Canelo-Khan fight will do anywhere near those same numbers on PPV, they do believe it’s going to do really nice numbers.

The attention the Canelo-Khan fight is getting is nothing short of extraordinary. Golden Boy Promotions made a brilliant move in selecting Khan for Canelo to fight because this clearly the right opponent for him. Canelo’s last fight against Miguel Cotto brought in 900,000 PPV buys on HBO, but the interest in that fight is nothing compared to the amount of hype that is going on with Canelo’s fight against Khan. Evidently, this was the perfect opponent for Canelo to fight. What it’s showing is that Mayweather made a mistake by not electing to fight Khan in the last two years when he was pushing hard for a fight against him. Filipino star Manny Pacquiao and his 84-year-old promoter Bob Arum also made a mistake in not choosing Khan instead of choosing Tim Bradley yet again.



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