By Dan Ambrose: Trainer Floyd Mayweather Sr. thinks that Saul “Canelo” Alvarez will share the same fate as welterweight Kell Brook when he gets inside the ring with IBF/IBO/WBA/WBC middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin in the future. Mayweather Sr. says that Golovkin has a better chin than Canelo, and that he’ll smother him in the same way that he smothered Kell Brook recently in stopping him in the 5th round in their mega-fight on September 10 of this month at the O2 Arena in London, England.
Brook had his moments in the fight, but eventually, Golovkin smothered him in the 5th round, which resulted in Brook’s trainer throwing in the towel to save his fighter from being badly hurt.
Mayweather Sr. says that Canelo doesn’t want the fight with Golovkin, and he sees that as a sign that he knows he can’t beat him.
“I seen a little bit of the Kell Brook fight. I told everybody the man can fight,” said Mayweather Sr. to Fighthyoe.com. “Triple G can punch and Triple G can smother you. That’s what happened. The same thing is going to happen to Canelo. I think Triple G can take shots better than Canelo. You see it yourself. Canelo don’t want to fight.”
Canelo would have a hard time trying to escape the pressure from Golovkin. Canelo doesn’t move well around the ring, and he always needs to rest after he throws shots. For a 26-year-old, Canelo’s stamina is not great at all. Stamina-wise, Canelo is more like a fighter in his late 30s to early 40s, then a 26-year-old fighter.
We saw how gassed out Canelo was against Liam Smith, and we saw the same thing from him in his fights against Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Austin Trout. Canelo just cannot fight hard for the full three minutes of every round, so he tends to back off and go to the ropes. That’s not a strategy for Canelo. That’s basically something he needs to do because he doesn’t have the cardiovascular system to fight hard for the entire rounds when his opponents push a fast pace.
You have to agree with Mayweather Sr. that Golovkin would definitely have little problems cornering the 26-year-old Canelo and smothering him. We saw how former World Boxing Organization junior middleweight champion Liam Smith was able to force Canelo up against the ropes repeatedly in their fight last Saturday night at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. Smith didn’t do anything special to get Canelo to retreat to the ropes other than push a fast pace. The problem that Smith had is when he did force Canelo to the ropes, he wasn’t throwing enough punches to give him problems.
Once Smith had Canelo against the ropes, he was waiting too long to get his shots off. Instead of throwing nonstop punches the way Golovkin would do, Smith would study Canelo and throw a few shots and then wait around for him to throw back. It was the wrong way to take advantage of Canelo. It would be different if Golovkin forced Canelo against the ropes. He would surely throw a rain of punches in the same way he did against Kell Brook earlier this month.
Canelo would obviously land some nice shots, but the pace of the fight would likely be too much for him. It would be a fight that would be fought at a pace two to three times faster than the pace of the Canelo-Smith fight. We saw how tired looking Canelo was in that fight, and Smith didn’t do much other than occasionally attack Canelo when he would stop throwing shots. Smith was trying to time his attacks when Canelo was resting, but what he should have done was attack the entire time and not just when Canelo was resting.
The problem with Smith waiting until stopped throwing shots was an obvious one. It meant that Smith was forced to take all the heavy shots from Canelo until he stopped throwing. Only then would Smith start throwing punches. It was a bad game plan, because it meant that Smith had to take a lot more punches than he was capable of taking. If Smith had thrown his punches at the same time Canelo did, he would have been able to keep from getting hit as much, and he would have worn him down faster.
If Golovkin gets Canelo up against the ropes all night long, I think it’s going to end badly for Canelo. He doesn’t punch as well when he’s backed up against the ropes. He may have dropped Smith with a cuffing right hand in round seven, but he doesn’t punch as hard.
Golovkin already has an advantage over Canelo in punching power, chin and punch placement, you can argue. If Golovkin is able to keep Canelo up against the ropes all night long, as we saw in the Canelo-Trout fight and much of the Canelo-Smith fight, then it’s going to end badly for the Mexican fighter.
At this point, it’s unclear whether the Canelo vs. Golovkin fight will ever take place. It would create big news if the fight were to happen in 2017, as the boxing world wants to see the fight, but I don’t think it’s going to happen unless Golovkin is given a better cut of the revenue. Giving him $10 million for the fight is probably not going to be enough. Canelo would be getting the lion’s share of the money that Golovkin helps bring in. There wouldn’t be equal sharing.