By Dan Ambrose: Golden Boy Promotions president Oscar De La Hoys is expecting his flagship fighter Saul “Canelo” Alvarez’s next fight against 31-year-old James Kirkland to be a huge one filled with a lot of slugging a ton of excitement when the two fighters face each other on May 2nd or May 9th at the Aladmodome in San Antonio, Texas.
The date of the Canelo-Kirkland fight still hasn’t been confirmed because De La Hoya is still waiting to see if the Floyd Mayweather Jr vs. Manny Pacquiao fight will get made for May 2nd.
De La Hoya says that Canelo has volunteered to move his Kirkland fight from May 2nd to the 9th on his own out of respect for the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight, which is the far, far bigger bout than his fight against the ring rusty Kirkland.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wjHZRWlkTU
In truth, however, Canelo pretty much has no choice but to move his Kirkland fight to another date because the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight will be on both HBO and Showtime, so there’s no network for Canelo to fight on if he chooses to fight on May 2nd. Unless Canelo agrees to fight on the undercard of the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight, he’d be out of luck in being able to fight on that date.
“Fireworks. A great fight [Canelo vs. Kirkland]; action-packed – These are the type of fights we want to see. Kirkland is a beast. He just keeps coming forward,” De La Hoya said via Fighthype.com.
You can make an argument that De La Hoya is digging really deep in selecting the out of shape Kirkland for the 24-year-old Canelo to fight instead of looking to match him against someone in shape and someone more relevant in today’s junior middleweight division. Kirkland hasn’t fought since 2013 when he beat Glen Tapia.
Kirkland has not only been out of the ring for a long, long time, but he’s reportedly put on a lot of weight and is close to 200 pounds. While some of the flab will be melted off during the training camp, it’s not likely that Kirkland will be able to take off all the weight in such a short period of time to be ready to fight Canelo at a high level on May 2nd or 9th.
So instead of getting a great fight like De La Hoya is talking about, we could see another horrible fight like the one where Kirkland was knocked out in just one round by the light hitting Nobuhiro Ishida.
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