De La Hoya: Mayweather is scared of Canelo

By Boxing News - 04/06/2013 - Comments

alvarez45By Dan Ambrose: Oscar De La Hoya of Golden Boy Promotions seems to be bummed out that Floyd Mayweather Jr. won’t fight one of De La Hoya’s Golden Boy stable fighters in WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (41-0-1, 30 KO’s), so now De La Hoya is saying the reason why Mayweather doesn’t want to is because he’s afraid of fighting Canelo.

De La Hoya told esnewsreporting.com “Unfortunately, Floyd didn’t want to sign a contract in advance to fight Canelo. So ask yourself this: Is Floyd scared to fight Canelo? I think he is…in order to beat Mayweather you don’t need to be a strong fighter; you need to be a smart fighter, which Canelo is.”

De La Hoya is making a mistake of looking past Canelo’s next opponent WBA junior middleweight champion Austin Trout. If Canelo can’t win that fight, and don’t be surprised if he doesn’t, then there’s no point in De La Hoya saying Mayweather is scared of Canelo because you can’t expect Mayweather to fight a guy that was beaten by Trout, can you?

De La Hoya needs to remember that Golden Boy has matched Canelo against incredibly weak opponents thus far and we still don’t know how the flat-footed Canelo will fight when he steps inside the ring for the first time against a quality opponent that isn’t over the hill or much smaller than him. De La Hoya could be in for a sad surprise when he sees the Canelo hype train ground to a halt by a one-sided loss to Trout.

Mayweather isn’t a Golden Boy fighter, but he does work with them at times. However, he’s not officially one of their guys in their stable. But if Mayweather were to fight Canelo, Golden Boy would make good money for making that fight, and that’s obviously why De La Hoya seems a little frustrated that Mayweather hasn’t said yes to fighting Canelo. But it’s not as if Mayweather won’t fight other Golden Boy fighters because he’s fighting Robert “The Ghost” Guerrero, one of their fighters on May 4th. I imagine Mayweather will likely fight another Golden Boy fighter after that, but it might not necessarily be Canelo.

I imagine Mayweather will fight Canelo sooner or later, but not under pressure from Canelo like he was doing with him trying to give Mayweather an ultimatum. If De La Hoya wants to blame anyone for the fight not getting made he needs to look at his inexperienced fighter Canelo, who made a huge blunder by giving Mayweather an ultimatum about fighting on his undercard. Canelo wanted Mayweather to sign a contract for a fight between them in September in return for him fighting on Mayweather’s undercard.

Canelo is only 22 and he’s clearly been coddled by Golden Boy with soft match-making, so it was laughable that Canelo tried to pressure Mayweather because he doesn’t have the experience or the status to get away with that kind of thing. Canelo is famous for being famous rather than for having accomplished anything in the ring. He’s just fought a bunch of shot fighters and smaller guys that Golden Boy has lined up for him and he’s not in the position to pressure a great fighter like Mayweather into fighting him.



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