By Dan Ambrose: WBC middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez addressed WBC mandatory challenger Gennady “GGG” Golovkin directly during an interview this week, telling GGG that he’ll “eventually” get the fight against him, but it’s going to take time.
It’s unknown if Canelo is speaking in code by saying that it’ll eventually happen, which could be code for ‘it’s not going to happen in 2016, buddy.’ We’re going to see how serious Canelo is in wanting to defend his WBC middleweight title against Golovkin, because Canelo is going to need to make a decision about the Golovkin fight 15 days after his next title defense against Amir Khan on May 7.
If Canelo still has the title after the Khan fight, he’ll have two weeks to make a decision whether he’s going to fight Golovkin or not. At the end of 15 days, Canelo must tell the World Boxing Council his intentions regarding Golovkin.
“Major fights like this take time,” said Canelo to esnewsreporting.com. “It’ll happen eventually, but it’ll take time. There’s a lot of negotiations back and forth. A lot of business aspects come into play, so it’ll happen. It takes time, but it’ll happen,” said Canelo to GGG.
This is the same kind of stuff that Canelo’s promoter Oscar De La Hoya of Golden Boy Promotions has been saying about the Canelo vs. Golovkin fight. De La Hoya has been saying “it’ll eventually happen.” But in the way that De La Hoya has been saying that, it doesn’t sound like he intends on making the fight happen anytime soon. It’s like he’s talking about far into the future.
One thing that we could see is Canelo choose the backdoor method of getting out of the Golovkin fight by giving him an ultimatum of accepting a fight against him at a catch-weight of 155lbs or else no fight. Then when Golovkin says that he’s not interested in fighting Canelo at a catch-weight, Canelo can say ‘See, Golovkin doesn’t really want to fight me because he’s not willing to fight me at a catch-weight.’
Canelo would then likely need to vacate his WBC middleweight title because he will have failed to fight Golovkin at the full weight for the middleweight title at 160. I say ‘likely’ because we just never know if the WBC is going to change their rules by voting to let their champions push catch-weights for their title defenses – all title defenses.
That would be a major change to the sport if the sanctioning bodies give their champions the power to push all their challengers to agree to a catch-weight. The champions would then be able to game the system by picking the lowest weight possible to get their challengers come in in order to fight them.
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