By Dan Ambrose: If Brandon Rios can get past WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley in their fight on November 7th, Rios’ trainer Robert Garcia is up for facing former WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez if he beats WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto in their fight on November 21st.
Top Rank promoter Bob Arum said on Tuesday to ESPN that he already spoke to Canelo’s promoter Oscar De La Hoya about matching the winner of the Rios-Bradley fight against Canelo if he defeats Cotto, and he’s on board with making that fight happen.
Arum obviously has no control over Cotto any longer, as he’s now promoted by Roc Nation Sports and isn’t likely to bother fighting Rios or Bradley.
Cotto would likely be looking to fight someone from the junior middleweight division rather than fighting a smaller welterweight like Rios or Bradley. Cotto will take enough heat as it is if he chooses not to fight WBC mandatory challenger Gennady Golovkin.
“Look, right now, Canelo has a very hard fight against Cotto also. So we can’t say the winner fights Canelo because Cotto could ruin everybody’s plans. Right now we’re focused on Timothy Bradley. That’s our main concern,” Garcia said to FighthubTV.com. “That’s all Brandon wants to think about. He’s not thinking about who he’s fighting next. But if that’s available, why not? If we could work something out with Canelo’s people — but that’s not the only fight available.”
A Canelo vs. Rios fight would be a rather silly one to watch because Canelo weighs as much as 175 after he rehydrates for his fights, and he would look like a light heavyweight against the smaller 5’8” Rios. The fight would make sense if Canelo wasn’t so huge, but he’s a guy that really should be fighting at middleweight instead of looking to fight welterweights like he’s done in the past.
Canelo has fought a lot of welterweights as it is in the past, and enjoyed huge weight advantages over them. But it would be kind of sad to see Canelo still choosing to fight welterweights now at this point in his career.
Could you imagine Gennady Golovkin looking to fight Bradley or Rios? The heat that he’d get from the boxing public would be tremendous. It would be incredible how much criticism he’d get from the fans.
“There’s more fights at welterweight. There’s also junior welterweights that Top Rank promote and Cameron Dunkin manages we could do something with,” Garcia said. “If we’re able to beat Timothy Bradley, Brandon could pick. He’d have lot of choices, and all of them would be huge.”
Garcia shouldn’t kid himself. There aren’t any fights for Rios at 147. He’s with Top Rank, which means that he’s kind of limited to the likes of Terence Crawford, Jessie Vargas or Ruslan Provodnikov. Those are the only fights I see available to Rios. He’s not going to get another fight against Manny Pacquiao.
Top Rank promoter Bob Arum said that he’s interested in matching Bradley against Pacquiao if he defeats Rios, but he doesn’t seem to be interested in matching Rios against Pacquiao. He probably knows that you can’t sell a second Pacquiao-Rios fight to the boxing public due to the one-sided nature of their previous fight in 2013, which was one by Pacquiao by a one-sided 12 round decision.
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