By Dan Ambrose: Saul “Canelo” Alvarez’s promoter Oscar De La Hoya is looking forward to Canelo’s September 16 match against middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (37-0, 33 KOs). This isn’t all that De La Hoya ia looking forward to. He is already thinking far beyond the September 16 Canelo-GGG fight to a rematch and then a trilogy. Unfortunately, the 26-year-old Canelo is not on board with De La Hoya in wanting to fight GGG three times.
Canelo says he’s only interested in fighting the Kazakhstan fighter once and that’s it. Canelo says he wants to make the fight so conclusive when he fights Gennady that there won’t be any need for a second and third fight between them.
When you think about it, Canelo might be better off if only fights Golovkin once, because the punishment he’s going to take against him will likely be really bad. If Canelo gets beaten up two or three times by Golovkin, his career could wind up being shortened drastically.
“No, there’s only going to be one,” Alvarez said via the latimes.com. “That’s how dominant I feel I’m going to be.”
I smell fear from Canelo. I don’t think he wants any part of fighting Golovkin more than he has to, because he’s got to know how tough this fight is going to be for him. We’re talking a lot of punishment Canelo will be taking in this fight.
Canelo might need to re-think his idea of him not giving GGG a rematch, because this fight could turn out to be a real nightmare for him. Canelo is so used to beating up on guys with limited talent and size. Canelo doesn’t seem to realize how big of a step he’s taking in facing Golovkin. We just saw in Canelo’s last fight against Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. how weak he is since moving up in weight.
Canelo was fighting at 164 against a weight drained fighter, and his power looked nowhere near the power of the top middleweights like Golovkin, Danny Jacobs, Jermall Charlo and David Lemieux. Canelo’s power looked at the same level as Billy Joe Saunders and Hassan N’Dam. Those are finesse type fighters. Golovkin is a bad fight for Canelo to be taking in his fist true contest at 160. You can’t count Canelo’s catch-weight fights at middleweight as true middleweight fights, as they weren’t at the full weight for the division and they weren’t against lesser fighters like Amir Khan, James Kirkland, and Alfredo Angulo.
The 5’8” Canelo is going to need to take some monstrous shots from the bigger 5’10 ½” Golovkin for him to have a chance of winning this fight. I don’t know if Canelo can go that because he looks like a fighter that is a division below Golovkin. I’m sure Canelo will bulk up a little by the time he fights Golovkin on September 16, but I don’t think that’s going to help him because Golovkin is true a middleweight.
When you take a fighter and have them bulk up, they don’t gain much power if any. You have to be a natural for a weight class in order to punch with the same power as fighters in that weight class. Canelo is still just a junior middleweight in terms of power. He’s not going to suddenly start hitting as hard as Lemieux or Golovkin just because he’s moved up to middleweight.
”I’m going into 160 now and I’m fighting the best at 160. I’m doing what I always said: ‘I want to fight the best,” said Canelo. “We’re now weeks away from this fight. I’m very, very excited, somewhat obsessed. “My team and I have come to the conclusion that this is 14 years of hard work that’s going to pay off on Sept. 16.”
Yes, Canelo is doing what he said he was going to do in moving up to the middleweight division to fight the best, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to turn out well for him. Canelo has been compared a lot to Adrien Broner recently. Broner was a fighter that dominated the lower weight classes, but when he moved up to welterweight, he found out that his power and size wasn’t good enough for him to compete with the best. Broner is now pretty much stuck at welterweight due to him being unable to fight at the lower weight classes that he once occupied.
Canelo will likely find himself in the same place with him not having the size or the power to dominate at middleweight like he did against the guys that his promoters at Golden Boy Promotions were matching him against in the 154-lb. division. Canelo might fail against Golovkin, and then continue to fail when he gets inside the ring with David Lemieux, Jermall Charlo and Danny Jacobs if his promoters make the decision to match him against those fighters. I don’t think they will. If Canelo loses to GGG, this could signal the end of his experiment at 160.
Canelo is going to find out that all that glitters isn’t gold. Canelo thought it would be so great after he moved up to middleweight, but now that he’s finally here, he faces a lot of tough fights that he probably doesn’t have the size or the power to win. Fighting Golovkin is just the beginning for Canelo. Unless Golden Boy is going to steer him around the best fighters at 160 like they clearly did at 154, he’s going to have to fight Danny Jacobs, David Lemieux and Jermall Charlo. Those are 2 guys that Canelo can’t avoid. Canelo didn’t fight the cream of the crop at 154 by not fighting the Charlos, Demetrius Andrade, Erickson Lubin and Julian “J-Rock” Williams, but he can’t continue to do that at 160 if he wants to be seen as a legitimate fighter.