Canelo knows what he needs to do to face Mayweather

By Boxing News - 05/16/2013 - Comments

canelo65By Dan Ambrose: If 22-year-old WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (42-0-1, 30 KO’s) wants the fight with Floyd Mayweather Jr. (44-0, 26 KO’s, and the fame that goes with that fight, then Canelo is going to have to have to take off some of that weight and down to 147 lbs. to make the fight happen.

If he can’t do it or is unwilling to do it, then he needs to focus on fighting other welterweights instead of Mayweather. There’s no point in Canelo, his team, Showtime or any of his fans to continue to talk about the fight if Canelo isn’t ready to move down to 147 to take the fight. Mayweather’s team has spoken and they’ve set the conditions for the fight.

If Canelo wants the fight then it takes place at 147, but if he can’t do that then he needs to move on and not waste his time and everyone else’s time with this. There are plenty of other welterweights or light welterweights that Canelo can fight and many of them would likely have no problems moving up to 154 to fight him and end up being outweighed by 20+ pounds on the night of the fight.

Expecting the more popular and much lighter Mayweather to agree to move up in weight to fight a less popular fighter like Caneo with a 20 pound weight advantage is asking way too much of Mayweather.

What it’s doing is flip-flopping how the fight should take place. In other words, Mayweather would be giving in to the less popular, less experienced and arguably less talented Canelo to give him his way in the negotiations for the fight. Why should Mayweather do this when Canelo hasn’t accomplished what Mayweather has?

The problem Mayweather has with being the most popular fighter in boxing is that he’s got all these fighters from the lower and upper weight classes that want to fight him. Lightweights, junior middleweights, middleweights and even super middleweights all want to fight him.

Canelo is a junior middleweight, but he weighs as much as a light heavyweight, and here he is calling out Mayweather. Why isn’t Canelo fighting guys from his own weight class? Why is trying to fight a guy that is 20 pounds lighter than him?

Mayweather doesn’t have his WBA junior middleweight title any longer, and that was just a one-off thing where he moved up to 154 for one fight against Miguel Cotto. It didn’t mean that Mayweather was going to fight all of the junior middleweights and spend the rest of his career at that weight because there’s no point in fighting the less popular guys at that weight, especially when Mayweather is going to be routinely out-weighed 10 to 20+ pounds each time he fights at junior middleweight.

I say again: If Canelo wants to fight Mayweather, then he has to move down to 147 and likely he’ll have to be prepared for a rehydration limit because he’d likely put on a ton of weight after he made the 147 pound limit and then end up close to 170 or possibly even over the weight.



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