Mayweather: Canelo shouldn’t fight Golovkin

By Boxing News - 05/14/2016 - Comments

floyd100By Dan Ambrose: Floyd Mayweather Jr. says if the popular Mexican fighter Saul Canelo Alvarez was under his promotional label, he wouldn’t let him fight the 34-year-old IBF/IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin right now. Mayweather thinks it’s too soon for Canelo to be fighting the Kazakstan fighter. Some boxing fans think Mayweather doesn’t want Canelo to fight Golovkin because if he loses to Golovkin, it will cheapen Mayweather’s win over Canelo from 2013. If Golovkin does a better job of beating Canelo than Mayweather did, then it would make Golovkin look great and Mayweather look not so great.

Mayweather brings up the example of how he could have pulled the trigger on a fight against Manny Pacquiao many years ago when fans wanted him to take the fight back in 2009. Mayweather would have made $60 million for the fight against Pacquiao if he’d taken it at the time.

Instead, Mayweather waited six years until 2015 and made $300 million for the Pacquiao fight. Mayweather isn’t saying how long he thinks Canelo should wait before he fights Golovkin, but it wouldn’t be surprising if six or seven years is the time frame for that fight. Golovkin is 34 now, and this means that for Canelo to get credit for beating him, he’s got to fight him while he’s still in his prime.

If the 25-year-old Canelo waits until Golovkin is 40 or close to that age, it will look like he waited him out until he was an old man. By waiting many years to fight Golovkin, Canelo will be seen as No.2 in the 160lb division all those years and that will limit how popular Canelo can become. Golovkin and his team will be sure to let the boxing public know that Canelo is afraid to take the fight. That will definitely hurt Canelo’s popularity.

“If I was Canelo’s promoter, I wouldn’t even fight Triple G,” said Mayweather to Fighthype. “Canelo don’t knee Triple G. Triple G needs Canelo. Triple G, he hasn’t shown me any heart yet. He just wants to stay at 160. No, that’s not what we’re going to do. At one particular time people were saying Floyd Mayweather is a coward, he was scared to fight Pacquiao. Once again, I told you I’m not just a fighter, I’m a businessman. At one particular time I was going to make upwards up to a guaranteed $60 or $70 million, probably $60 million [to fight Pacquiao], but then I could have made $100 million total. I didn’t rush. I took my time. It’s about having patience. I took my time. I had patience and I made $300 million. I can’t say what he made. It was real low, but if Pacquiao was my fighter, he would have made a lot more. Canelo is a hell of a champion. He’s a good champion. He goes out there and does what he has to do. But Canelo is making a lot of noise in the sport of boxing,” said Mayweather.

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Mayweather’s waiting on the Pacquiao fight may have worked for him in this case, but it could have backfired if the two of them had started taking a lot of defeats. As it was, Pacquiao was clearly not the same fighter he’d been years earlier in 2009. Pacquiao had been knocked out by Juan Manuel Marquez in 2012 and beaten by Tim Bradley in the same year. Pacquiao’s knockouts also dried up completely after his fight against Miguel Cotto in 2009, and that was a clear sign that Pacquiao wasn’t the same fighter from that point. Mayweather was lucky that the fight against Pacquiao generated a lot of money because if he’d waited a year longer, the fight would have been a smaller affair.

I don’t think Canelo can wait on the Golovkin fight because it would mean that Canelo would need to fight other high quality fighters in the meantime. In looking at Canelo’s fight against Amir Khan and some of his other bouts, I’m not sure that Canelo can go very long before he gets beaten again by somebody. If all Canelo’s promoters at Golden Boy are going to do is match him against welterweights or old and washed up junior middleweights, then I think Canelo will be able to keep winning for another six years while Golden Boy lets the Canelo-Golovkin fight marinate. But I think the boxing public is going to want to see Canelo fighting quality guys that are at least somewhat the same size as him like Jermall Charlo, Demetrius Andrade, Daniel Jacobs and Peter Quillin.

I think Canelo would have a good chance of losing to one or more of those fighters. Those are difficult fights for Canelo, and he’s not like Golovkin in having the ability to guarantee a win. Canelo is a limited fighter with zero mobility, who struggles when facing guys that move and jab. The only reason beat Khan was because the welterweight makes a lot of mistakes. If Khan had fought smart and not tried to throw left hooks, he might have beaten Canelo.

You can’t blame Golovkin for wanting to fight Canelo now. Golovkin is 34 right now, and he doesn’t have the time left in his career to wait six years to let the fight marinate. If Golovkin is forced to wait for the Golovkin fight, he could get old enough to lose to somebody. Golovkin could lose his skills as he gets older and wind up losing to someone that is able to get to him before he lowers the boom on them. Once that happens the money that can be made on a Canelo vs. Golovkin fight goes down dramatically.

Golovkin would be seen immediately by the boxing world as an old timer that no longer has it. We saw how Sergio Martinez’s status dropped overnight after his loss to Miguel Cotto in 2014. Before that fight, Martinez was seen as the best fighter in the middleweight division. But after Cotto beat him, Martinez was nowhere and pretty much forgotten by the fans. That’s why it’s a risky thing for Canelo to follow Mayweather’s model is waiting out Golovkin because it might backfire on him and result in the fight becoming overcooked like the Yuriokis Gamboa vs. Juan Manuel Lopez fight. Their promoter Bob Arum had resisted the idea of putting Gamboa and Lopez in the ring for years, as he wanted to let the fight marinate. Unfortunately for Arum, he waited too long and Lopez was twice beaten by Orlando Salido. So instead of getting a big money fight between Gamboa and Lopez, Arum was left with nothing.