By Allan Fox: WBC welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. said he’s not sure who he’ll fight in September, but he’s not ruling out a fight with WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, a fighter that many boxing fans want to see Mayweather fight.
Mayweather said this to ESPN in response to whether he’d be interested in fighting Saul Alvarez: “They’re always throwing names at me. Like I said before, everyone wants to fight Floyd Mayweather. It’s like a lottery ticket. I want to go home, spend time with my family, talk to my team and see what we can come up with and see what the game plan is. I’m not taking anything away from Canelo. I’m not saying the fight isn’t going to happen, but at the present time I’d rather enjoy my victory, go home, talking it over with my family, take a vacation, and then we go from there.”
Coming off of Mayweather’s impressive 12 round unanimous decision win over Robert “The Ghost” Guerrero last Saturday night, the landscape for Mayweather doesn’t look very promising in terms of big fights at 147. The only big name in the division other than himself is Manny Pacquiao, and Mayweather said he doesn’t want to fight him because he’s lost his last two fights.
Canelo is kind of in the same boat. There are zero names at 154, which is why Golden Boy Promotions keeps matching him against welterweights. Canelo can’t make the welterweight limit without really dropping a great deal of weight, but that doesn’t mean he can’t use his popularity to pull welterweights up in weight to face him at 154.
The only fighter that Canelo is interested in fighting in the weight classes above him is WBC middleweight champion Sergio Martinez, but he’s injured and will be out for the remainder of the year with a hand and knee injury. The other middleweights – Peter Quillin, Daniel Geale and Gennady Golovkin – aren’t popular enough for the risk involved.
Those guys would be very dangerous fights for Canelo because they fight for a full three minutes of every round, not just one minute, and they punch really hard. This means that Canelo only has one option and that’s pull welterweights up in weight to face him.
Mayweather would is a true welterweight, even though he did move up to defeat former WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto last year in May in a fight where Mayweather was giving away a lot of weight to the 165 pound Cotto.
That fight showed that Mayweather doesn’t have the size to fight at 154, as he took a lot of punishment in that fight. As such, it would be a difficult fight for Mayweather to move up to 154 again and fight Canelo if he rehydrates to over 170. He’d be even bigger than Cotto was, and that seemed to be the limit for what Mayweather could do.
In an ideal world, Canelo would come down to 147 to fight Mayweather so that the fight could take place, but Canelo probably isn’t going to attempt to do that because it would likely leave him too weak to fight. But on the flipside, if Mayweather comes into a fight with the 170 to 175 lb. Canelo weighing only 150 lbs, he’d be giving away too much weight.
I’m sure Canelo just wants the fight and the payday involved and doesn’t care how the fight takes place, but with Mayweather you have to worry about the weight because he’s potentially fighting a guy that will out-weigh him by over 20 pounds on the night of the fight. That’s a lot of weight to be giving up for someone like Mayweather who weighs only 150 when he fights.
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