By Dan Ambrose: WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (41-0-1, 30 KO’s) hasn’t received the guarantee that that he was looking for from Floyd Mayweather Jr. to fight him on September 14th this year, and because of that Canelo is prepared to fight on another date rather than fighting on Mayweather’s undercard on May 4th against WBA World junior middleweight champion Austin Trout.
According to Esto, Team Canelo will be traveling to Los Angeles to meet with Golden Boy Promotions president Oscar De La Hoya about what options Canelo has for fight dates and possible opponents if Mayweather refuses to agree to fight Canelo in September.
The dates that Canelo’s team is looking at are April 20th in Mexico or May 11th in the United States, but NOT against Trout. It wouldn’t be against Trout for some reason. The other names that Golden Boy has mentioned for Canelo to fight next in the recent past are Alfredo Angulo or James Kirkland. Those are winnable fights for Canelo, but neither fight would answer the question about whether Canelo is a fighter based on hype or if he’s actually the real deal.
Golden Boy hasn’t put Canelo in with the best fighters in the 154 pound division in Trout, Erislandy Lara and Vanes Martirosyan, and if they feed Angulo or Kirkland to him then it would be a continuation of what many boxing fans see as soft match-making to keep Canelo from being exposed by a good junior middleweight. For me, I’d just be happy to see Canelo fight someone from the junior middleweight division because I’ve seen him fight way too many welterweights in the past two years and it’s incredibly disappointing.
Canelo perhaps doesn’t realize that he really doesn’t have any way of pressuring Mayweather to fight him. To be sure, Canelo can choose not to fight on Mayweather’s undercard on May 4th, but it won’t have a whole lot of effect on the card because Mayweather is already fighting a Mexican in the main event in Robert Guerrero, so it’s not as if Mayweather absolutely needs Canelo in order to attract Mexican boxing fans to purchase the fight card on pay-per-view.
Additionally, Mayweather can rather easily replace Canelo by having the young star Adrien Broner fight in the co-main event, and he will likely bring in just as many boxing fans as Canelo would, if not more. As such, Mayweather will be just fine without Canelo on the card, and the one that’ll be hurt is Canelo because he won’t be seen by millions of boxing fans who would never take the time to watch his fights because many of them have never heard of him.
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