By Dan Ambrose: It looks like Golden Boy Promotions has decided to match their young star WBC junior middleweight champion Saul Alvarez (40-0, 29 KO’s) in another safe fight by putting him in with WBA junior middleweight champion Austin Trout (25-0, 14 KO’s) on September 15th in a non-pay-per-view bout televised on Showtime, according to boxing news from Dan Rafael.
I’m frankly not surprised that Golden Boy won’t risk making this a PPV bout, because who in their right mind will be willing to pay to see Alvarez face Trout? Alvarez isn’t a big star in the United States yet, and Trout is still a virtual unknown among casual boxing fans. If they made that fight a PPV event it would be lucky to draw even 20,000 buys. Alvarez isn’t there yet to the Manny Pacquiao or Floyd Mayweather Jr. stage to where he can fight lesser known fighters and still bring in huge amounts of fans to purchase his fights.
Golden Boy still needs to hook fans by showing Alvarez on regular cable for another couple of years before he’ll be a star. Ideally, they should wait three or four years before they try and turn Alvarez into a PPV star, because it took that long for both Mayweather and Pacquiao to become big PPV stars. They weren’t just thrown out there early in their careers and expected to bring in fans in PPV events. Those guys reached that level in their late 20s. You got to build the fan base first and then look to make the fights on PPV.
I think this is going to be a really boring fight, because Trout is dull to watch when he slips into the boxing mode of his game, and he definitely will against the hard hitting Alvarez. This is going to be a very boring fight.
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