By Scott Gilfoid: WBO junior middleweight champion Liam Smith is saying today that Saul “Canelo” Alvarez purposefully ducked the Gennady “GGG” Golovkin fight by choosing to go in another direction. Smith says that Canelo built up the hopes of the boxing fans for the GGG fight by talking tough with him inside the ring after his fight against Amir Khan last May, but then he chose to give up his WBC belt rather than fight him.
I personally don’t see Canelo doing anything wrong by not taking the Golovkin fight. I think Canelo should wait five years before he fights Golovkin. If he’s still around by that point, then so be it. He gets the fight. If not, then that’s his problem. I mean, it’s not as if the casual boxing fans were demanding the fight. It was a fight too soon to be made.
I can understand Canelo taking a business approach to the match-making for his career by electing to wait on the Golovkin fight to see if he becomes more popular over time. Goodness knows, Golovkin clearly isn’t popular enough right now for Canelo to fight him. We saw that with Golovkin’s poor pay-per-view numbers for his fight against former IBF middleweight champion David Lemieux last year in October 2015. Believe me, if that had been Canelo fighting Lemieux, it would have done HUGE numbers on pay-per-view. Canelo brings in the PPV numbers, Golovkin doesn’t. That’s just the way it is.
“[Canelo] ducked him [Golovkin] massively. He went the wrong way about it. He’s being criticized a lot and losing a lot of fans about the way he did it,” said Liam Smith to Fightnews.com. “If he was open and honest about it, people would have understood.”
Who is Smith kidding? The boxing fans wouldn’t have understood if Canelo had tried to sugarcoat it by coming up with a different excuse for not fighting Golovkin. Heck, Canelo was in a situation where he could have said anything and the fans would have been upset with him.
The hardcore fans want the Canelo-Golovkin, and they’re going to continue to skewer Canelo big time for not giving them what they want until he finally does fight him. I can’t see those same fans being there for Canelo when his career is over and he potentially needs a helping hand for anything.
It’s in Canelo’s best interest to take the fight with Golovkin when the time is right and the money is right. Why give up millions by taking a fight against GGG before it’s marinated properly. That’s just flat out dumb! If Floyd Mayweather Jr. had agreed to fight Manny Pacquiao back in 2009, when the boxing public wanted him to first take that fight, Mayweather would have lost millions by making that move. By waiting six years to finally fight Pacquiao in 2015, Mayweather made a ton more money.
Mayweather says that he would have made $50 million at most if he fought Pacquiao in 2009. By waiting until 2015, Mayweather wound up getting $250 million for the same fight. It’s obviously a little trickier for Canelo in waiting on the Golovkin fight, because the Kazakhstan fighter is up there in age at 34 right now.
If Canelo waits too long, then Golovkin could get beaten by someone, and then a fight against him would be next to worthless. It wouldn’t be worth taking the fight with him at all, period if he loses to someone else before he chooses to fight him. I think that’s a gamble that Canelo and his promoters at Golden Boy Promotions are willing to take. But they have to hope that Golovkin doesn’t get old and get beaten before the fight comes off.
We saw how Top Rank promoter Bob Arum waited too longer to match Juan Manuel Lopez and Yuriorkis Gamboa against each other when he promoted both fighters. While Arum was letting that fight marinate, Lopez got beaten twice by Orlando Salido. After that, there was no point in Arum putting Lopez in with Gamboa, because it wasn’t a fight that would ever sell.
“The way he went about it after the fight with Cotto he got GGG in the ring and said he’d put the gloves back on,” said Smith about Canelo. “I just think he went about it the wrong way.”
I don’t blame Canelo for talking a little trash in the heat of the moment after his fight against Khan. After all, Canelo is a boxer. He’s not a calculating politician that is on message every time. Canelo obviously wasn’t thinking strategically when he started speaking after his fight against Khan. It was pure Adrenalin that was causing Canelo to talk. He obviously changed his mind after the fight that he wasn’t going to fight Golovkin at this time.
Fighters can change their mind, can’t they? I don’t think Canelo should get any grief for that. With all that sweet cash that he can make in fighting easy guys like Liam Smith and Amir Khan, why fight Golovkin right now? The fight obviously isn’t big enough right now, and Canelo hasn’t exhausted all the easy money he can make by fighting guys like Smith, Khan and Billy Joe Saunders. There’s a TON of easy marks out there for Canelo to fight to make the quick cash. If I was Canelo, I would wait until I’ve exhausted all the quick, easy cash before I would look in the direction of Golovkin and Daniel Jacobs, if those fighters are still around at that point. If they’re not, then Canelo would be the master of all he surveys. He would be the top dog by default.
Liam Smith will be fighting Canelo next month on September 17 on HBO pay-per-view at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. I sure as heck don’t agree with the fight being televised on pay-per-view in the States but if you can get away with it, so be it. You know the old saying, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.” There will be enough of Canelo’s fans willing to purchase his mismatch against Smith on HBO pay-per-view for it to be a success. I wouldn’t be surprised if it brings in 600,000 PPV buys. That doesn’t mean it’s a good fight. It just means that there’s a ton of Canelo’s fans that would willing to pay to see him fight anybody. He just so popular right now.