By Dan Ambrose: WBC middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez’s fight against Amir Khan is said to be just a little under 600K, according to the LA Times. The number was a good one considering that Canelo wasn’t facing a big star and he had to do most of the heavy lifting himself with his own star power likely pulling in the fans.
The 600,000 was far off from the 900,000 Canelo brought in against Miguel Cotto last November and the 2.2 million he helped bring in for his fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. three years ago in 2013. But for Canelo to be bringing in 600K for a mismatch against a pumped up welterweight with a known chin problem in Khan, it’s pretty impressive.
Canelo out-drew both Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao in their recent PPV fights against Andre Berto and Tim Bradley. Those were both said to have brought in 400K each, which were terrible numbers compared to the numbers those fighters previously were able to pull in. Canelo’s promoter Oscar De La Hoya is probably jumping for joy today and giving high fives to his fellow Golden Boy employees over the success of the Canelo-Khan fight.
The potential downside of Canelo’s mismatch against Khan bringing in good PPV numbers is that this could embolden the 25-year-old Canelo and his promoters at Golden Boy to steer a wide berth around IBF/IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin so that they can avoid a cataclysmic event. Fighting Golovkin and getting knocked out by him in a really bad manner could knock a huge chunk off Canelo’s future PPV fights.
Asking boxing fans to pay to see you after you’ve been knocked out by Golovkin might seem like fruitless effort on Canelo’s part, especially if he’s knocked out bad. That’s why the 600K buys the Canelo-Khan fight reportedly brought in mind be a bad thing for the sport of boxing if it means Canelo will sidestep GGG now in order to keep scooping up easy money fighting welterweights and/or ring rusty old guys like James Kirkland and Alfredo Angulo.
It’s pretty surprising that the Canelo vs. Khan fight brought in close to 600,000 buys, because if Golovkin had elected to fight Khan, the boxing public likely would have skewered him for taking on such a soft target and stayed away like the fight was the equivalent of the plague. The fact that Canelo could bring in so many fans shows you how large his built in fan base is in the United States.
That’s both good and bad. It can be good if Canelo fights high quality opposition that has a decent chance of beating him. It can be bad if Canelo uses his large fan base to handpick welterweights and old and slow junior middleweights to fight.
For Canelo to continue to do good PPV numbers, he’s going to need to start fighting the best in boxing like Golovkin. I don’t think Canelo’s fans are going to put up with him selecting welterweights or washed up junior middleweights for him to fight each time. They’re going to want to see Canelo fight Golovkin, even if it means he’s going to get thrashed from one side of the ring to the other.
Canelo has to take the training wheels off and step up to a higher level for better or for worse. Canelo been lucky with the scoring from judges in many of his fights over the last three years. Unfortunately, a fighter like Golovkin takes the judges out of the equation completely due to his punching power. This means that Canelo will need to win by skills and not luck against Golovkin if he takes the fight with him.
My prediction is that Canelo and Golden Boy will use the PPV numbers that he got for his fight against Khan as an excuse not to fight Golovkin. I see Canelo avoiding Golovkin with an excuse about him not agreeing to a catch-weight or the purse. Canelo will then move forward to continue to fight guys that he has a very good chance of beating for decent paydays. Canelo won’t get the big paydays if he’s going to be pooling opposition from the welterweight division and the injured and inactive lists, but he’ll get decent money.