By Dan Ambrose: Tom Loeffler of K2 Promotions says he feels confident about the chances of the middleweight unification fight between WBC champ Saul Canelo Alvarez and IBF/IBO/WBA middleweight champ Gennady “GGG” Golovkin can get made now that Canelo has beaten Amir Khan.
Before that fight took place, Loeffler says he wasn’t sure if he could make the fight between Canelo and Golovkin. But now that Canelo has beaten Khan, the pressure is on Canelo from the boxing fans and the media. Canelo now realizes how big of a fight it’ll be against Golovkin, says Loeffler.
Loeffler feels that the Canelo-Golovkin fight can now get made. There’s no roadblocks keeping the two fighters from facing each other like there was with Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao because both guys fight on HBO. They both have the same sponsor Tecate as well.
“I’ll tell you, before the fight, I wasn’t so convinced, but with that knockout over Khan and all the fan pressure and the media pressure, I think Oscar and Canelo both understand how big of a fight this can be,” said Loeffler to Power 106 Los Angeles. “The bigger the fight, the easier it is to make. There’s no issues, like, Mayweather-Pacquiao had so many issues with the testing, with the TV networks. (Canelo and Golovkin), everything is the same. They even have the same beer sponsor, Tecate. There’s no issues on that side, it’s just working out the details.”
It’s true that there isn’t anything blocking the Canelo vs. Golovkin fight from getting made other than possibly a catch-weight, if Canelo chooses to go that route. I don’t know why he would. Why cheapen a potential victory by using a catch-weight handicap of 155. If Canelo wins the fight, he won’t get the same amount of credit that he would if he didn’t use a catch-weight.
I don’t know if Canelo would like it if fans didn’t respect him as much for beating Golovkin because he needed a catch-weight to drain him. If you need a crutch to beat a certain fighter, then maybe you shouldn’t be fighting that guy. If a fighter doesn’t have the confidence in themselves that they can get the job done without some kind of weight handicap, then they probably should be going in another direction to fight someone they do feel confident of beating without having to game the system by using a catch-weight to weaken a fighter.
“From Gennady’s side, it would’ve been done already, this last fight. But we have a great relationship with Golden Boy and with Oscar, and he called me on Sunday, like he promised,” said Loeffler. “It was a brief conversation, he said it was a big promotion for him, wanted to take a couple days off, and we were supposed to speak later on today. It is by far the biggest sport in boxing.”
Golovkin isn’t the A-side, and he doesn’t have the same kind of options available to him that Canelo does for big payday fights. Canelo showed in his fight against Amir Khan last Saturday night that he can bring in a decent amount of pay-per-view buys even if he’s not fighting a big name. Canelo-Khan pulled in close to 600,000 buys on HBO PPV.
While those numbers aren’t monstrous compared to some of the fights we’ve seen in the past, they’re still quite good for a mismatch between a middleweight Canelo and a welterweight Khan. If Canelo can pull in 600K PPV buys in fighting welterweights, then he can slowly work his way through the welterweight division in fighting all then top fighters in that class at 155 and bring in 600K PPV buys each time.
I’m sure Canelo and his promoters at Golden Boy would be more than pleased to get that amount of PPV buys each time, especially when there’s no real risk involved due to Canelo’s big weight advantage over them. Canelo is in no hurry to take the fight against Golovkin because he has massive amounts of other options available to him in terms of other opponents.
Canelo can clean out the welterweight division, and then pick and choose different opponents from the junior middleweight and middleweight divisions. I wouldn’t imagine seeing Canelo fight some of the more difficult fighters in the 154lb division like Jermall Charlo or Demetrius Andrade, but I do think he would take on Jermell Charlo, Liam Smith, Cornelius Bundrage, Billy Joe Saunders, and Andy Lee. I don’t think Canelo will fight Peter Qullin or Daniel Jacobs. I see those guys as being too dangerous for Canelo because they have the size and the punching power to give him problems.
“When you see Gennady’s fan base, he sold out Madison Square Garden, he sold out The Forum,” said Loeffler. “Canelo sold 30,000 tickets in Houston, he sold out the T-Mobile Arena. When you have two big fan bases like that, two popular fighters, two middleweight champions, both on the pound-for-pound list, that’s the biggest fight we can make.”
Canelo-Golovkin is clearly the biggest fight that can be made in the sport right now, but that doesn’t mean it will get made. It makes sense for the two fighters to face each other right now, but it could be bad for Canelo if he loses the fight because he’ll likely wind up with fewer fans if he gets knocked out. We saw how Manny Pacquiao’s PPV numbers dropped off after his knockout loss to Juan Manuel Marquez in 2012, and after his 12 round decision defeat to Floyd Mayweather Jr. in 2015.
I think there’s some worry on Golden Boy’s part that they could wind up with a depleted fan base for Canelo if Golovkin beats him especially bad. We could see a BIG tilt with Canelo’s fans sliding in the direction of Golovkin. Even without this fight, Golovkin is steadily winning new fans with his long string of knockout victories. American boxing fans love to see knockouts, and Golovkin has been supplying that for the past eight years with his long 22-fight knockout streak.