By Dan Ambrose: Former WBA/WBC light middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez’s next fight later this year could wind up being televised on regular HBO rather than pay-per-view, according to Dan Rafael.
Canelo’s recent fights have all been televised by Showtime, but apparently he’s a television free agent and can fight for whichever network of his choosing. In this case, you would have to think that he’ll go to the network with the deepest pockets and with the most subscribers.
By Canelo fighting on HBO, his fights would be seen by potentially more boxing fans, and this in turn could eventually down the road lead to Canelo getting bigger pay-per-view numbers than what he’s been seeing in his last two fights against Erislandy Lara and Alfredo Angulo, both of which fights brought in 300,000+ PPV buys.
Canelo met with Golden Boy Promotions this week in their headquarters to talk about his next opponent for November or December. They still haven’t said who the main target is for the fight due to the likely fear that it’ll cause this fighter to ask for more money, but it’s expected to be James Kirkland, a straight ahead slugger with good power but a less than sturdy chin.
It would be a fight that could possibly wind up on regular HBO, and it would then setup a title shot for Canelo against WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto in the first half of 2015.
“Canelo isn’t going to go pay-per-view,” Golden Boy vice president Eric Gomez told Dan Rafael of ESPN.com. “We don’t want to saturate the market. He’s willing to go live on either Showtime or HBO. We’ll see. Maybe another network. He has no contract with any network…He gave up a couple of dates…He wants to fight late November or early December.”
Kirkland is still a dangerous opponent for Canelo even though he’s badly flawed. We saw in Canelo’s fights against Lara, Austin Trout and Floyd Mayweather that he doesn’t have the engine to beat the better fighters by conclusive decisions.
Canelo’s win over Lara was controversial, and his victory was one knockdown away from being a draw. And we saw what happened to Canelo when he fought Mayweather. He got totally schooled by him.
WBO junior middleweight champion Demetrius Andrade and former IBF welterweight champion Joshua Clottey are also names in the Canelo sweepstakes.
Clottey is a realistic option because he’s up there in age at 36, but Andrade is probably too dangerous for Canelo. I see Canelo fighting either Kirkland or Clottey, depending on which one of them is willing to come in at the price that Golden Boy is offering them.
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