Mayweather takes credit for building Canelo’s popularity in U.S

By Boxing News - 07/07/2013 - Comments

Canelo with fans(Photo credit: Esther Lin/Showtime) By Dan Ambrose: Floyd Mayweather Jr. believes that he and his team have a lot to do with WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez’s popularity in the United States by letting Canelo tag along on his undercards for the past couple of years. By allowing the 22-year-old Canelo fight on his undercards, Mayweather has let millions of casual American boxing fans to be exposed to Canelo for the first time.

Mayweather said to ESPN “It was a great idea for my team, Leonard Ellerbe and Al Haymon, to continue to take this guy [Canelo] and put him on my undercard to let him slowly build his fan-base. Of course, in Mexico it can be a fighter that wears a minor belt and they’re going to cheer for him and go crazy for him, which is a great thing, to stand behind their own.”

I think Mayweather has a good point. If he didn’t let Canelo fight on his undercards, then Golden Boy would have a fighter that was pretty much totally unknown with casual fans in the United States with Canelo. I’m sure Golden Boy wouldn’t have been happy if Mayweather said no to them putting Canelo on his undercards, but what could they do.

Mayweather is the one that calls the shots, and Canelo would have been in a situation where his fights would have likely been televised on regular HBO and Showtime, and that would have definitely made him even more obscure. Even now, though. I personally don’t know of anyone that has ever heard of Canelo.

When I mention Canelo to people at work and parties, no one has heard of him. They all know who Mayweather is, but they don’t know who Canelo. That tells me that Golden Boy Promotions has a lot more work cut out for them in building Canelo’s fan base in the U.S because he’s not at the Mayweather level and he’s definitely not at the level Oscar De La Hoya was in his prime.



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