By Dan Ambrose: It looks like the reports from earlier on Monday about WBC middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and IBF/IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin letting their fight marinate for another three more fights has turned out to be little more than speculation.
A source is saying to Fight News that the fight between Golovkin and Canelo won’t have any additional interim fights to help build the fight. The talk from today was Canelo would take two or three more interim fights against David Lemieux and/or Curtis Stevens. For his part, Golovkin would fight WBA World middleweight champion Daniel Jacobs.
It’s a deal that would have worked in the favor of the younger 25-year-old Canelo’s favor because he’s a lot younger than the 34-year-old Golovkin. The more time that goes by the better it is for Canelo both in terms of age and in the fight building more to become a bigger fight.
It doesn’t help Golovkin though for the fight to build because he’s got a race against time to fight Canelo while he still has his skills intact before age starts hitting him. Further, it helps Golovkin more to take the fight against Canelo now because Golovkin will become more popular if/when he beats Canelo.
A win over Canelo now could turn Golovkin into a PPV attraction for the remainder of his career. Even if it doesn’t make him a PPV fighter, it will likely increase his ratings on HBO, and it could lead to endorsement deals for the Kazakhstan fighter. Canelo has more to lose right now than Golovkin because he’s already a very popular fighter, and the chances are high that he’ll lose the fight and lose badly.
At this point, it might hurt the Golovkin vs. Canelo fight for them to take any additional interim fights because they could fail to shine in one or more of those fights. Canelo is especially vulnerable to looking bad and maybe losing, especially if he faces Curtis Stevens or David Lemieux. Those are guys that have the punching power to send Canelo down to his second defeat of his career. A loss for Canelo to one of those guys would sink a fight against Golovkin for the time being.
Canelo would need to rebuild his career to get back to where he is right now, and that might take a couple of years. Losing to Lemieux or Stevens is a much different matter than losing to Floyd Mayweather Jr. Canelo was beaten by Mayweather in 2013, but that was against one of the best fighters in the sport, Stevens and Lemieux aren’t considered the best fighters in boxing. They’re just too big punchers who both were stopped by Golovkin in the past.
Golovkin is pretty solid with his skills. There’s no one in the division right now that has the potential to unseat him or make him look bad. Jacobs would likely be easy work for Golovkin despite the fact that he can punch as hard as him and has better hand speed. Jacobs’ problem is he’s been vulnerable in the past when hit hard by guys with power. Getting hit by Golovkin for 12 rounds would be a problem for Jacobs.