By Dan Ambrose: As far as former super middleweight champion Andre “SOG” Ward is concerned, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez has nothing to prove to anybody by having to fight Gennady “GGG” Golovkin when the boxing fans want him to. Ward believes that Canelo has already proven himself many times over in big fights that he has courage to take on dangerous opposition and he shouldn’t have to be questioned about his heart by the boxing fans.
Ward says he likes the way Canelo’s promoter Oscar De La Hoya is guiding his career by moving to the Golovkin fight when it’s the right time. Ward brings up the example of how the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao fight ended up making a lot more money by having it wait until the time was right to make the match-up.
Ward says that the boxing fans need to have more patience when it comes to fights that they’re waiting to see happen.
“I don’t think Canelo has anything to prove, I really don’t,” said Ward to the boxing media. “He’s fought the best. He’s given us one big fight after the next. He’s given so much to the sport. It’s just amusing the kind of response he gets when he doesn’t move wherever the people think he should move. I think we go a little too far when we start to question his courage; when they say he doesn’t have heart. To be honest with you, I think Oscar De La Hoya is doing a great job. I think he’s letting you know the fights going to happen, but it’s going to happen when he says it’s going to happen. If the fight happens, it may be like Floyd [Mayweather Jr.] and [Manny] Pacquiao. It’s twice as much. How can we say that fight happened too late when they made three times as much money. Sometimes we need boxing fans to show a little more patience. The fighter’s courage should never come into question,” said Ward.
Ward is very complimentary of Canelo. I think many fans would disagree with Ward though when it comes to Canelo always fighting the best. Let’s be real; Canelo has fought only handful of good fighters during his career. Here are the best fighters Canelo has fought during his 11-year pro career: Floyd Mayweather Jr., Erislandy Lara, Austin Trout, Miguel Cotto, Amir Khan and Liam Smith. That’s just six fighters, and you can argue that Cotto, Khan, smith and Trout were flawed guys. Cotto was small and old when Canelo fought him. We haven’t seen Canelo fight the real talents in the 154lb division like the Charlo brothers, Demetrius Andrade and Julian “J-Rock” Williams, and we haven’t seen Canelo fight the best middleweights in Golovkin and Daniel Jacobs.
The fans aren’t making money by waiting for big fights to happen. They want to see the fights when the fighters are in their prime of their careers, and not when they’re old. If you look at the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight last year, it might have been great for the two fighters to make the kind of money they made, but it wasn’t great for the boxing fans, because Pacquiao wasn’t the same fighter he’d been six years earlier when fans first started asking for the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight to take place back in 2009. Last year, Pacquiao was nothing like the fighter he’d been back in 2009.
At 37, Pacquiao is clearly not in his prime. So it doesn’t help fans if they have to wait until fighters are over-the-hill before the fights are made. I think it’s bad for the sport Ward might not understand that, because he’s not factoring in how bad the fight was. The feeble way that Mayweather and Pacquiao fought upset fans. They had waited so many years and paid so much money to see the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight, and they expected excitement, drama and most of all effort from the two combatants. You can argue that a lot of the fans that paid to see the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight won’t ever purchase another boxing match on pay-per-view ever again. The fight burned bridges with some fans. That’s why it’s not a great thing to have a match marinate for many years until the fighters are older and no longer in their primes. It’s bad for the sport. It might be good for those fighters at the time they finally get their big payday, but I think it hurts the rest of the fighters and I believe it hurts the careers of the same fighters that let their match marinate for so many years. Look at the pay-per-view numbers for Mayweather and Pacquiao’s fights after their match last year and tell me that they didn’t hurt their own careers with their performances.
It’s interesting that Ward is still talking about the Golovkin fight not happening for himself. He thinks the match against Golovkin should have taken place before his scheduled fight against IBF/WBA/WBO light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev, which will be taking place on November 10. Ward says that Golovkin’s promoter Tom Loeffler was offered a 50-50 deal for Golovkin-Ward fight, but they didn’t want the fight.
Ward had this to say about Golovkin to Fighthype.com this week:
“Triple G turned down a 50-50 fight. He said in 2017 is what he said. I’ve had people say put the e-mail out. I won’t do it, because it’s not that serious. I feel like my word should mean something. I can literally pull that [e-mail] up right now between Roc Nation and [Golovkin’s promoter] Tom Loeffler. The fight was offered 50-50. Every detail was 50-50, and we made him a conscious effort as a team to make him a 50-50 offer just so there was no wiggle room, 50-50, the weight and everything. ‘Oh, that’s great. I appreciate the offer. Maybe if the fight is still hot, we’ll do it in 2017,’” Ward said in explaining what was told to him by Team Golovkin. “We know what that means. But then they go on record and say the opposite. If they had kept quiet, it would have been fine, but they keep talking about it. So I’m going to be honest about what happened. They didn’t want the fight. It shouldn’t have took Kell Brook doing what he did to show people why they don’t want the fight. They can say whatever they want, but the reality is they didn’t want the fight. I think it would have been a great match-up for the fans. I think that fight should have happened before the [Sergey] Kovalev fight should have happened.”
I don’t know that the Golovkin vs. Kell Brook fight is a good example in predicting what would happen if Golovkin had fought Ward. What we found out in that fight is that Brook didn’t have the power to hurt Golovkin. If Ward wants to put himself in the same category as Brook, then it means he’ll lose to Golovkin if the two of them ever face each other. Golovkin was willing to take Brook’s weaker shots in order to get close enough to him to hit him with his harder shots. Eventually, Brook’s right eye got busted up and he ended up needing to be saved from Golovkin to avoid getting seriously hurt. The only thing we can learn from that fight is that you can hit Golovkin, but eventually you’re going to get broken down physically by his harder shots, and then you’ll need saving by your trainer.