By Dan Ambrose: Despite Golden Boy Promotions CEO Oscar De La Hoya saying that his fighter Saul “Canelo” Alvarez will be facing Gennady “GGG” Golovkin in the Fall of 2017, there still isn’t a written agreement from Golden Boy to guarantee that the fight between the two middleweights will take place at that time.
De La Hoya wants the Canelo-Golovkin fight to marinate more until next year, and he also wants Canelo to have more time to get used to fighting at middleweight. It’s not quite clear how Canelo is going to get comfortable fighting at the full weight of 160lbs in the middleweight division with him moving down to 154 to challenge WBO junior middleweight champion Liam Smith on September 17.
Canelo is going in the opposite direction of the middleweight division by challenging Smith. If there’s no guarantee in writing that Canelo will be fighting Golovkin in 2017, then we could see that fight kicked further into the future. It wouldn’t be a bad deal if Golden Boy keeps kicking the fight further away if the 34-year-old Golovkin was the same age as the 25-year-old Canelo. But with him closing in on 40, it’s worrisome to see the fight not taking place. The last thing we need is Canelo fighting Golovkin with him coming out to center ring with a walker or a cane to help get around the ring.
“If we can get a verbal agreement from them, that’s fine,” Loeffler said to RingTV.com. “I’ve done a lot of fights where there hasn’t been anything signed but as long as the fighters want to fight then we can put the fight together. So that clearly would be at the top of our list and that’s the direction we’ll go unless it looks like it’s not going to be feasible. But I have a lot of faith that fight will happen next fall.”
It seems like Loeffler is the patient type. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing in this case. If he takes a permissive attitude about what Canelo and his promoters at Golden Boy are doing in pushing the fight into the future each time, then might just keep doing same thing in the future.
Golovkin and Loeffler need to be assertive about this, because it’s no good if they’re going to get the fight years from now when Golovkin is too old to win. I don’t think it’ll bother Canelo and Golden Boy too much if the fight doesn’t take place anytime soon because they’re making good money fighting the likes of Amir Khan, James Kirkland, Miguel Cotto and now Liam Smith.
If I were Golovkin, I would have never agreed in the first place with Golden Boy telling him to wait until next year for the Canelo fight. It looks too much like Golden Boy and Canelo are calling the shots and leading Golovkin around by his nose. I wouldn’t go for that. Golovkin has waited for the Canelo fight long enough, and he shouldn’t have to wait longer. He was supposed to already have fought Canelo so that he could take the WBC title from him in the traditional manner. Having Canelo’s scalp would have made Golovkin more money in his future fights because he’d be a bigger star. Instead of having Canelo’s pelt, Golovkin is being told to wait until next fall in 2017 for the fight. I don’t think it’s good for him or Loeffler to go for that.