By Dan Ambrose: Golden Boy Promotions CEO Oscar De La Hoya revealed earlier today that the winner of the May 7th fight between former IBF middleweight champion David Lemieux (34-3, 31 KOs) and junior middleweight Glen Tapia (23-2, 15 KOs) could be in line to face WBC middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (46-1-1, 32 KOs) in the future at some point. It would be an impossible situation for Lemieux to fight Canelo in his special weight class of 155lbs. Lemieux couldn’t even make the recent catch-weight of 163lbs for his last fight. How is he going to melt down to Canelo’s 155lb weight division?
Judging by how things went for Lemieux in his recent fight against Gennady “GGG” Golovkin, you would have to think that the fight will be taking place soon. Golden Boy can’t afford to wait too long before they match Lemieux with Canelo.
If they wait too long to put the two together then it might be too late to interest the boxing fans because Lemieux is so flawed. The same with Canelo. He’s totally flawed, and is pretty much getting over on size only with his weight advantage that he generally has over his opponents.
“Yes, I do see the winner from Glen Tapia and David Lemieux facing Canelo down the line. This was obviously by design. Right now Canelo is the man in boxing and he’s the Pay-Per-View star,” said De La Hoya.
Canelo has a fight on May 7 against welterweight Amir Khan. If he doesn’t win that fight, then it could be bad for him and potentially for Golden Boy Promotions. Canelo is their Golden goose, and it would be really bad for them if he gets beaten by Khan.
It’s unclear why Lemieux is being matched against a fighter like Tapia, because this guy isn’t as middleweight. He’s a junior middleweight. By selecting an opponent from the weight division below him, Lemieux’s chances of success are greatly enhanced.
Tapia was blown out in four rounds in his last fight 10 months ago by Michel Soro in May 2015. Since that fight, Tapia has been out of action. De La Hoya doesn’t see this as a problem for Tapia, because he thinks he’ll be fine like Andre Ward was when he recently returned to the sport after having been out of the ring for ages since his fight against Paul Smith last June.
The only problem is Tapia isn’t Andre Ward. He’s also not a middleweight. Tapia will have not only ring rust to deal with on May 7, but a real size advantage. Lemieux is struggling to make the 160lb division at this point in his career, and he failed to make weight earlier this month for his fight against James De La Rosa.
“And you take a look at Andre Ward, who just fought last Saturday, had a year layoff. He looked terrific,” said De La Hoya in defending Tapia’s long layoff from the ring. “He looked amazing. Like Glen was saying, he was in the gym, he was training. So I think that long layoff maybe did him some good.”
No matter how much De La Hoya wants to whitewash it to make it sound like it’s a good thing that Tapia has had such a long layoff, it’s not a good thing. It only means he’s going to have it that much tougher when he gets inside of the ring with the much heavier Lemieux in this fight. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lemieux rehydrates into the 180s for this fight. By the time that Tapia steps foot inside the ring with Lemieux on May 7, he’ll have been out of the ring for 12 months. Again, this is not a good thing for a fighter to be out of the ring. Even Andre Ward didn’t look great in coming off of a nine month layoff.
The fight is scheduled for 10 rounds, but I see there being little chance of it going past four. Tapia caved in quickly against Soro last May in losing by a 4th round knockout. Tapia was also blown out in six rounds by James Kirkland in 2013. Tapia is a good 2nd tier fighter, but he clearly doesn’t have the talent to deal with 1st tier fighters, even flawed ones like Lemieux.
“David Lemieux is, you know, coming back and wants to prove to everyone that he still belongs in the top of the middleweight division and is going to be world champion again,” said De La Hoya.
If Lemieux wants to prove that he still belongs at the top of the 160lb division, then he should be fighting middleweights, not junior middleweights like Tapia. Lemieux should also prove that he can still make the weight limit for the middleweight division, because he failed to do so in his last fight against De La Rosa.
I think there’s a lot of boxing fans that have doubts about Lemieux after the way he looked in getting bludgeoned into submission by GGG last October. There were fans that doubted Lemieux before that fight, but after the way he was so easily handled by Golovkin, I don’t see there being too many fans believing in Lemieux any longer.
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