Sanchez doubts De La Hoya wants Canelo-Golovkin fight

By Boxing News - 03/09/2016 - Comments

delahoya433By Dan Ambrose: IBF/IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin’s trainer Abel Sanchez believes that Golden Boy Promotions CEO Oscar De La Hoya is already coming up with excuses to get his fighter WBC middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez out of the fight with Golovkin later this year.

De La Hoya recently told the media that the negotiations between Golovkin and Canelo will be very difficult. Sanchez doesn’t understand why De La Hoya would say this other than him priming the media to get them ready for him and Canelo to pull out of the negotiations and go in a different direction.

Unlike De La Hoya, Sanchez doesn’t think the negotiations between Canelo and Golovkin will be difficult, because they’ve already agreed to the stipulations about the weight for the fight.

“Negotiations can’t even start until Canelo wins his fight against Khan,” said Sanchez to Michelle Phelps. “What if he loses to Amir Khan? That’s the first thing. The second thing is he’s just trying to make excuses for what’s going to happen after the 7th; excuses for why he’s not going to fight Golovkin. We have a paper in place that was signed by Oscar’s people, by Canelo’s people that says he’s got 15 days after the fight to declare whether he’s going to fight Golovkin or not. He then has 30 days to negotiate. If he says ‘yes,’ then he has 30 days to negotiate,” said Sanchez.

I don’t believe that De La Hoya is making excuses to get Canelo out of the Golovkin fight. I think De La Hoya is letting Golovkin know that he’s going to need to agree to a catch-weight of 155lbs if he wants the fight. If Golovkin says no to the handicap that Canelo and De La Hoya wants, then I think they’ll pull out of the fight. The catch-weight is Canelo’s ace in the hole in getting an immediate advantage over Golovkin.

Canelo is very good at boiling down in weight, so it’s not going to hurt him nearly as bad to get down to 155lbs than it will be for Golovkin. That’s not because Canelo is lighter than Golovkin. It’s more of a case of Canelo being the younger fighter, and younger fighters seem more capable of taking weight off without it hurting them compared to the older fighters. Golovkin is going to need to make a decision right now whether he’s willing to fight at 155. If he’s not, then he need to be prepared for Canelo and Golden Boy to walk away from the negotiations with the excuse that Golovkin wasn’t willing to negotiation. They won’t get blamed in the media if they can say that Golovkin wasn’t flexible.

“We haven’t started negotiations; so how can it be difficult,” said Sanchez. “And once the negotiations have started, if they can’t come to an agreement within 30 days, then it goes to a purse bid. According to the WBC’s rules, there’s stipulations about weight. If it’s a middleweight title, then it’s at 160 pounds. They’re already making excuses for why they’re going to say no on the 8th or the 7th or the 9th of May. It’s easier to setup the road now to blame somebody for their unwillingness to do what they promised to do. It’s not Gennady that’s going to force Canelo to vacate. It’s the stipulation that they agreed to. I hope so for Canelo’s sake because there are certain stipulations that he wants to fight Golovkin. So if he’s being untrue about this, then that means all the other things that he agreed to, he was just agreeing to in order to remain the champion. If he doesn’t want to be a middleweight, then go off to somewhere else. Let the real men fight for the middleweight title,” said Sanchez.

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The weight stipulations that Sanchez talks about don’t mean anything. Canelo and Golden Boy see themselves as the A-side in the negotiations obviously, and they’re going to play that angle. It’s like with Floyd Mayweather Jr. When he was negotiating with his opponents, they understood he was the A-side. If they didn’t want to agree to the terms for the negotiations, then they would be hurting themselves potentially by risk not getting the fight. If Golovkin wants the WBC title above all, then he’ll get it if Canelo walks away from the negotiations after Golovkin refuses to give him the weight handicap that he might be asking for.



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