Canelo Alvarez wants Mayweather, Cotto or Marvilla on May 5th, 2013

By Boxing News - 10/12/2012 - Comments

Image: Canelo Alvarez wants Mayweather, Cotto or Marvilla on May 5th, 2013By Dan Ambrose: WBC junior middleweight champion Saul Alvarez (41-0-1, 30 KO’s) may be only 22-years-old and may have mainly an assortment of weak older guys and/or smaller fighters than him, but he’s now saying he’s ready to fight Floyd Mayweather Jr, Miguel Cotto or Sergio “Marvilla” Martinez for his next fight on May 5th next year.

Despite taking little punishment in his easy 5th round TKO win over light welterweight Josesito Lopez last September, Alvarez doesn’t plan on fighting in December of this year. Instead, Alvarez says he’s going to become a twice a year fighter who fights in May and September the way that much older, and much more established fighters tend to do.

Being that Alvarez is still only 22 and with little experience against quality opposition, it seems like a stupid thing for him to limit his fights to twice a year. He’s been carefully matched by his promoters at Golden Boy Promotions by putting him in with small guys like Josesito Lopez, Matthew Hatton, Alfonso Gomez, Ryan Rhodes, Jose Miguel Cotto, and older guys like 40-year-old Shane Mosley, 40-year-old Lovemore N’dou and 40-year-old Carlos Baldomir.

Boxing fans would like to see Alvarez at least show that he deserves to fight the likes of Mayweather, Cotto and Sergio Martinez by actually fighting someone good like the winner of the Erislandy Lara vs. Vanes Martirosyan fight before he starts calling out the best in the junior middleweight division.

Alvarez told RingTV “Yesterday, we had a meeting with people at Golden Boy Promotions, and we agreed to fight on May 5, and it’s going to be against Maravilla Martinez, Miguel Cotto or Floyd Mayweather, in that order.”

I wish Alvarez a lot of luck getting those fights, but I can’t see it happening, not with Mayweather, not with Sergio Martinez, and maybe not even with Cotto. Obviously, Cotto is Alvarez’s best bet because he can probably be lured into the fight if enough money is offered to him by Golden Boy. It’ll have to be a lot of money, though, because he’s not going to take on a popular fighter like Alvarez for chump change. However, Cotto may not get past his December 1st opponent Austin Trout, and that’ll throw a huge monkey wrench into Alvarez’s plans.

That would mean that he won’t get Mayweather, he won’t get Martinez and he definitely wouldn’t get Cotto. Alvarez could get Trout, but how many people would want to see that? Trout is still an unknown fighter, and he’ll still be an unknown even if and when he beats Cotto in December. With no one else available on his hit list, Alvarez can fight Trout but I don’t think anyone will care about that fight. I see less people being interested in seeing Alvarez fight Trout then there was for Alvarez’s last fight against light welterweight Lopez. The Alvarez-Lopez fight drew big numbers on Showtime in terms of ratings, but Lopez is a Hispanic fighter and there’s a huge Hispanic audience in the U.S for boxing. I don’t see Trout bringing in the same kinds of numbers in a fight with Alvarez.

Sergio Martinez isn’t going to fight Alvarez because Martinez has a big money rematch against Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. early next year. Why would Martinez want to screw that fight up for lesser money where he’ll have to lose weight to fight Alvarez? It’s not going to happen. Martinez will take the Chavez Jr. fight and Alvarez will be out of luck.

Alvarez is like a lot of younger fighters calling out the top names before he’s even proven himself worthy of fighting them. What Alvarez needs to do is fight the winner of the Lara-Martirosyan fight to prove that he deserves to fight the top guys. A lot of boxing fans think that Alvarez has been steered around both of those guys for some reason, and it’s not helping that Alvarez himself is saying he wants to fight the top names rather than these guys, who have been waiting for a title shot against him since last year.

There’s no excuse for Alvarez fighting a light welterweight like Josesito Lopez instead of top contenders from his own division like Lara or Martirosyan. There’s no excuse for fighting old guys like Shane Mosley and Kermit Cintron instead of Lara or Martirosyan. It just looks like Alvarez wants to skip to the head of the pack without paying his dues by facing the best contenders in the division to show that he’s for real.



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