By Jeff Aranow: Trainer Floyd Mayweather Jr. says WBC middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez will have many problems against a fighter like Gennady “GGG” Golovkin if the two of them face each other. Floyd Sr. doesn’t know if he would favor the 25-year-old Canelo in that fight, because he feels he would be in the same situation as Amir Khan was against Canelo last Saturday night.
Canelo would need to move constantly and fight like Khan to keep from getting knocked out by Golovkin. The problem that Canelo has is he doesn’t move well around the ring due to his short, stocky legs, which aren’t meant for movement.
Further, Golovkin cuts off the ring better than anyone in the middleweight division right now, and Canelo wouldn’t be able to escape for him for even one round.
Canelo would be under the gun from round one, and his only chance of winning would be for his chin to take Golovkin’s shots for the full 12 rounds. Given that Golovkin has knocked out 22 straight opponents, the odds would not be in Canelo’s favor to see the final bell.
“I think that Canelo was losing, because Amir Khan was sort of moving on him, but I told everybody it doesn’t make a difference how long he runs, because whenever Canelo hit him, that was going to be it,” said Mayweather Sr. to Fighthub.
When asked about how Canelo would do against Golovkin, Mayweather Sr. said, “Well, that’s a little bit different. I don’t know about picking Canelo in that particular fight. But I did pick Canelo to beat Amir Khan, but I don’t know about Canelo beating GGG. That’d be a tough fight for Canelo. Canelo would probably have to do what Amir Khan was doing to win, but you got to keep it up. You can’t caught in the process of moving around and dancing. Then all of a sudden you lose focus on what you’re doing. You get caught up, you’re in trouble.”
Let’s be serious; Canelo’s chances of doing what Khan was doing what be about zero. Canelo has a wrestler’s body. He’s not athletic and he lacks the gazelle type body that more mobile fighters possess, and he’ll never have that. Canelo is a slugger who tries to use some of the elements from Floyd Mayweather Jr’s game. The qualities would likely be ineffective against Golovkin because he’s not going to be turned away by a simple shoulder roll defense. Canelo would need more in his armament to have a chance against Golovkin.
A fight between Canelo and Golovkin would likely play out in the same way Golovkin’s fights against slugger Curtis Stevens and David Lemieux played out. Golovkin would use his superior jab to dominate Canelo from the outside for seven or eight rounds before going for the kill in the 8th or 9th round to take him out.
It would be embarrassingly easy for Canelo, and I suspect his promoters at Golden Boy realizes this. That’s why they’re likely going to give Golovkin an offer to fight at a catch-weight of 155lbs, knowing that he’ll turn the offer down. Once he did, they will announce to the media that Golovkin didn’t want the fight and turned down their reasonable offer.
Canelo did not look at all good against Khan last Saturday night. If Canelo didn’t get a knockout in the 6th round, it could have been ugly for him with Khan either winning or getting robbed. At the time of the stoppage, Canelo was ahead on two of the judges’ scorecards despite most boxing fans feeling that he was losing the fight. We had the makings of Canelo winning a very questionable decision.
“The knockout was impressive because Khan was winning the fight, but I knew — I just figured, I didn’t know when he was going to really catch him, but I knew it was going to happen sooner or later,” said Floyd Sr.