By Dan Ambrose: Golden Boy Promotions President Oscar De La Hoya has made it official about his fighter former WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez to be fighting James Kirkland at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas.
The dates of the fight will be either May 2nd or May 9, depending on whether the Floyd Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquiao goes ahead for May 2nd.
The idea of placing the fight at the Alamodome in San Antonio is obviously one where De La Hoya and Canelo are hoping to take advantage of the huge crowd that Canelo drew for his fight against Austin Trout in April of 2013.
Canelo brought in 40,000 boxing fans, fueled in part by the low ticket prices for the fight. The large crowd may have saved Canelo from losing the fight or getting a draw, because Trout fought well enough to deserve a close victory or a draw at the minimum.
Canelo clearly didn’t prove that he was better than Trout, because Canelo spent too many rounds just covering up on the ropes and not throwing punching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyTuQFZ4yqc
There’s no way that a minor fight like Canelo and Kirkland would be able to compete against a major fight with meaning like the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight, so De La Hoya and Canelo wisely will be moving off the May 2nd date rather than find their fight card wind up being seen by very few boxing fans.
As it is, the Canelo-Kirkland fight likely won’t bring in huge ratings because it involved Canelo facing a guy who has largely been on the shelf since 2009 in Kirkland.
It’s been years Since Kirkland has been fighting on a regular basis year after year. Kirkland is known by the hardcore boxing fans, but totally unknown to the newer fans of the sport. But De La Hoya and Canelo don’t have much choice.
The 154 pound division is a landmine in terms of the dangerous opponents that Canelo would have to face if he weren’t taking on the inactive Kirkland, who reportedly is close to 200 pounds according to Dan Rafael of ESPN.
If Canelo weren’t facing the ring rusty and fleshy Kirkland, Caenlo would have huge pressure from boxing fans for him to fight the likes or Demetrius Andrade, the Charlo brothers and Erislandy Lara.
Those are fighters that all would have a good chance of beating Canelo. Lara arguably beat Canelo last July in a fight in which Caenlo won a controversial decision.
Lara outclassed Canelo in that fight and fought well enough to deserve a victory. But more importantly, the fight showed that Canelo hasn’t improved at all since his one-sided loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr in September of 2013.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hnq5W16IYw8
Without any improvement in the red-headed Canelo, it puts De La Hoya in the situation where he’s digging up older fighters from the past like Kirkland and Joshua Clottey. However, there’s only so much time that De La Hoya can make these kinds of match-ups before he’s going to finally need to put Canelo in with the better fighters at 154, if that’s a division that Canelo intends on trying to stay in.
It is kind of troubling that Canelo has fought in three consecutive catch-weight fight over the last two years. That tells you that Canelo is going to need to make a tough decision at some point whether he’ll officially move up to middleweight to fight at the full weight of 160 for the class or continue to drag fighters into the middleweight division to fight them at catch-weights at 155.
You’d hate to see Canelo creating his own weight class of 155 instead of him fighting at the full weight. What would the boxing greats like Sugar Ray Leonard, Julio Cesar Chavez Sr, Pernell Whitaker and Kostya Tszyu say about Canelo needing catch-weights to fight at instead of him just taking the plunge to fight at the full weight of the middleweight division?
If Canelo is going to be the next pay-per-view star to carry the sport of boxing for the next 10 years like De La Hoya is saying he is, then why is needing catch-weights?
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