By Dan Ambrose: Oscar De La Hoya of Golden Boy Promotions wants to move his fighter Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (44-1-1, 31 KOs) for bigger and better things following his 12 round split decision win over Erislandy Lara (19-2-2, 12 KOs) in their middleweight fight last Saturday night, but there are still quite a few people who feel that Canelo was given a bogus win over the Cuban fighter.
Former two division world champion Robert “The Ghost” Guerrero is one of many people who believe that Lara did enough to deserve a win over Canelo last Saturday night.
“I watched @Laraboxing fight in Mexico yesterday and mostly everyone including me thought he beat Canelo. #Boxing #Rematch,” Guerrero said on his twitter.
There’s a quite a few people who feel that Lara deserved at least a draw out of the fight, if not a victory, because Canelo didn’t do enough to show that he was a clear cut winner.
Unless Canelo starts winning his fights more conclusively when facing top opposition, it’s going to be tough for Golden Boy Promotions to turn him into an eventual pay-per-view attraction capable of brining in 1 million buys each time he fights.
With Canelo winning close decisions like the Lara fight and his fight against Austin Trout, it sends a pretty strong message that Canelo might not be the right guy for Golden Boy to count on in the future a star capable of strengthening their company.
You’ve got to expect the 154 and 160 pound divisions to continue to improve slowly over the next 3-5 years with new stars emerging. If Canelo isn’t able to beat the top guys right now without controversy, then what’s going to happen in the future when he’s a little older fighting opposition that is better than the guys he’s been struggling against?
Golden Boy can always not match Canelo up against those fighters, like we’re seeing with Canelo not being matched against Gennady Golovkin despite him being the most obvious opponent that he should be put in with. The problem is when the divisions improve to where there’s not just one guy that Canelo needs to be steered around, but 3 or 4, it’s going to look bad if Golden Boy isn’t making those fights. It’ll also look bad if Canelo takes those fights and wins controversial decisions like we saw against Lara, and then moves on rather than gives a rematch to the guy he just beat controversially.
At 23, Canelo is likely to soon be too huge to continue to melt down to junior middleweight to fight, and he’s going to have to move up to middleweight. Can Canelo still do well in fighting at middleweight? Yes, with the right match-making. If they put him in with guys like Marco Antonio Rubio, and keep him away from Golovkin.
Canelo can succeed if he fights at middleweight and pools his opposition from the junior middleweight division with the fighters being asked to move up to fight him at middleweight. We’ve seen Canelo do that at junior middleweight in fighting welterweights and in some cases light welterweights with them coming up in weight to fight him.
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