By Dan Ambrose: Golden Boy Promotions president Oscar de La Hoya says that the reason he opted to move his star Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (44-1-1, 31 KOs) over to HBO from Showtime is that Canelo asked him to make the move is because De La Hoya didn’t want to upset the 24-year-old Canelo and jeopardize his relationship with the red-headed star.
De La Hoya wasn’t willing to take the risk of saying no to Canelo and potentially mess things up for himself.
De La Hoya said that he wanted to work with HBO anyway, so it wasn’t a situation where it was important for him to risk his relationship with Canelo by saying no.
With HBO’s larger subscriber base, De La Hoya’s fighters have the potential to be seen by more boxing fans. This in turn will make them bigger stars, and for fighters like Canelo that potentially means more pay-per-view buys for his fights, even the ones against horribly over-matched opposition like Alfredo Angulo.
“I have to do what Canelo asks me to do,” De La Hoya said to Dan Rafael of ESPN.com. “I’m not going to jeopardize my relationship with Canelo. The biggest factor for him was being second to nobody. So that’s what I did — I made the deal with HBO, where he won’t be second. You’re dealing with someone who is 24 years old. He’s a superstar in Mexico and realizes his potential in the States. He has another 10 years to go, and he wants to capitalize as much as he can.”
The other thing that Canelo told De La Hoya that he wants is to fight on the two Mexican holidays in 2015, which puts the 24-year-old Canelo and Golden Boy Promotions on a crash course of competing with Floyd Mayweather Jr, as he plans on fighting on both of those dates next year as well. What this means is that Canelo will receiver far, far less pay-per-view numbers for both of his PPV fights in 2015 than if he were to have picked out another date where Mayweather isn’t fighting.
It’s hard to calculate the lost PPV buys that Canelo will lose by him insisting on fighting on the same nights as Mayweather, but it’s got to be a fairly significant number. That’s money that Canelo will be losing. I’m not sure if De La Hoya has sat Canelo down and broke down the money figures he’ll be losing by him competing with Mayweather, but De La Hoya needs to.
Mayweather won’t lose anything because he’s got a guaranteed contract that pays him a certain amount for each of his fights. It’s doubtful that Canelo has a similar deal with HBO.
As for who Canelo will fight next in his fight on December 6th, De La Hoya said that James Kirkland is now a possibility for him, as well as Joshua Clottey and Carlos Molina. “Absolutely, it’s a possibility. Maybe Kirkland,” De La Hoya said.
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