Canelo could pick up WBA strap in Panama

By Boxing News - 05/16/2013 - Comments

alvarez452By Dan Ambrose: WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez may end up having to travel to Panama to pick up his World Boxing Association 154 lb. title he won against former WBA champion Austin Trout last month at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas.

According to fightnews.com, the WBA executive vice president Gilberto Mendoza Jr. is waiting to find out what date Canelo will be coming to Panama City to pick up the WBA strap.

Surprisingly, the WBA still hasn’t’ stripped WBA Super World junior middleweight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. of his title despite the fact that he hasn’t defended the title in over a year since he defeated former WBA champion Miguel Cotto last year in May. I wonder what the WBA is waiting for.

They should have stripped him of the title by now since he hasn’t defended it and doesn’t appear to have any plans on defending it. I guess they’re waiting to see if Mayweather will be moving up to fight Canelo at 154 in September. I think they’ll be waiting a long, long time for that to happen.

That fight isn’t going to happen at 154, and I don’t see Mayweather ever bothering to fight again at 154 to defend the WBA title because there’s no one defend it against in term of big names. Canelo would be good, but he rehydrates way too high in weight and Mayweather doesn’t need to be fighting 172 pound fighters in the 154 pound division.

Canelo’s win over Trout took place with semi-open scoring and it was a controversial win in the eyes of a lot of boxing fans, who saw Trout as having done enough to deserve the win.

The open scoring seemed to help Canelo in a big way because when the scores were released after the 4th and 8th rounds, it showed that two of the judges had Canelo winning almost every round of the fight, which forced Trout to change his game plan from boxing Canelo to slugging with him.

This favored Canelo in a huge way. If the WBC is going to be using open scoring for Canelo’s future bouts then it’s going to put him in a position where he’s hard to beat, especially if you have judges giving him rounds where he only throws a tiny handful of punches and is getting badly out-worked by his opponents.

Suffice to say, Mayweather would never agree to fight Canelo with open scoring and if the WBC tried that one on him, he’d probably refuse immediately and that would put the WBC in the position where they’d have to back down with their insistence that it be used for the fight.



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