De La Hoya: Canelo won’t give Golovkin respect

By Boxing News - 03/21/2017 - Comments

Image: De La Hoya: Canelo won’t give Golovkin respect

By Dan Ambrose: Oscar De La Hoya is saying that Saul Canelo Alvarez won’t be giving Gennady Golovkin any respect when/if he faces him in 2017. De La Hoya saw Golovkin’s fight last Saturday night against Daniel Jacobs and he thinks that the “Miracle Man” Jacobs gave him too much respect. De La Hoya says GGG can expect no respect from Canelo in the future. However, De La Hoya also says that the odds of the Canelo-Golovkin fight taking place are now lower after his fight with Jacobs last Saturday night at Madison Square Garden.

De La Hoya is talking bold on Canelo’s behalf, but he’s also letting the boxing fans know that fight has less of a chance of happening now. It’s a mixed De La Hoya is sending. He might have been better off being more optimistic about the Canelo-Golovkin fight taking place than than talking the fight down.

“Jacobs gave Golovkin too much respect,” said De La Hoya to the latimes.com. “That’s the mistake Jacobs made. In the second half of the fight, he did terrific, but in the first half of the fight, he gave Golovkin too much respect. Mark my words: when Canelo and Golovkin gets made, Canelo’s not going to respect him one bit. Right from the start,” said De La Hoya.

If Canelo doesn’t give Golovkin respect, then that means he’s going to go right after him from the word go and look to slug it out. I wouldn’t recommend that Canelo do that. He looked like he was having major problems in his last fight against Liam Smith when he was taking power shots from the British fighter while backed against the ropes.

If you put Golovkin in place of Liam Smith, I think Canelo would be at serious risk of being knocked out by him. Golovkin hits too hard for Canelo to not show him a high degree of respect inside the boxing ring. Moreover, Canelo doesn’t have the engine to stand and trade with Golovkin for 11 rounds without him needing to take a rest break against the ropes. Once Canelo against the ropes, Golovkin is going to work him over with power shots until he’s got him knocked out.

Canelo won’t have to worry about giving respect to Golovkin if he never faces him. That’s the easiest way not to give him respect. Another way is to give him an offer than is so low that he would be ripping himself off by accepting it. There’s a school of thought that Golovkin should accept the lowball offer made by Golden Boy to face Canelo now so that he can potentially make even more money in a rematch against him if he beats him.

The reason why it’s not a good idea for Golovkin to take the much smaller money for the Canelo fight is because Triple G is about to turn 35. He doesn’t have as much time to hang around the sport to let his paydays build compared to the 26-year-old Canelo. At best, Golovkin might have another 2-3 years left in his boxing career before he loses his skills and is suddenly beatable. Another reason why it’s not a good idea for Golovkin to take the smaller money against Canelo is if he beats him, Golovkin probably won’t get a rematch against him. Why De La Hoya would let Golovkin get a second shot against Canelo if he knocks him out viciously in September. That would be an insane move by De La Hoya and Golden Boy to let Canelo fight Golovkin a second time if he gets knocked out by him in September. For that reason, I think the Canelo-Golovkin is going to be a one and done type fights.

They’ll fight, and that will be it if Canelo gets knocked out. That means if Canelo gets a 90-10 split of the revenue for the fight against Golovkin, then he would be hogging the profits that Golovkin helps bring in. Unless Golden Boy is going to give Golovkin a guaranteed rematch, it’s not worth it for him to accept the smaller money to fight Canelo. Looking at the fight in a logical manner, Golovkin is going to get a raw deal if he faces Canelo for the much smaller money, because there likely won’t be a rematch. If Canelo destroyed Golovkin, then won’t be a rematch, because the boxing public won’t buy a second fight between them. If Golovkin obliterates Canelo and exposes him like Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Erislandy Lara both did, then I definitely don’t see him getting a rematch. We saw how Lara didn’t get a rematch against Canelo after he was arguably robbed in their fight in 2014. I see it the same way for Golovkin.

“I’ve always been confident in Canelo’s abilities,” said De La Hoya. “He’s only getting stronger. He’s only getting faster. He hasn’t peaked.”

I don’t agree that Canelo is getting stronger or faster. De La Hoya is way off in thinking that Canelo is getting better. What I do notice is Canelo is getting bigger. Like a lot of fighters that start to edge closer to 30, he’s putting on size. In his recent sparring this week with a light heavyweight, Canelo looked bigger than him. That was really surprising that Canelo would look bigger than a light heavyweight, but I don’t think this is anything new.

Canelo has looked huge in his last three fights against Liam Smith, Amir Khan and Miguel Cotto. Canelo’s fight night weight is no longer being revealed by HBO Boxing, so the fans can only speculate how heavy he is. It’s like with Jacobs. We don’t know how much he weighed on the night of the fight last Saturday against Golovkin because his weight wasn’t given by HBO. We heard that Jacobs supposedly weighed 176, but he looked a lot bigger than Golovkin, who was weighed in by HBO at 170 lbs. before the fight. There’s no way that Jacobs was just 6 lbs. heavier than Golovkin. He looked at least 15 lbs. in my opinion if not 20 pounds. That would put Jacobs’ weight at 190 on the night of the fight. I think that’s a reasonable estimate of Jacobs’ weight.

De La Hoya needs to make sure that he keeps his eyes on the task at hand of Canelo trying to get by Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., because that could wind up being a very tough fight for him on May 6. If Chavez Jr. gets in great shape and is able to turn the fight into a war like Liam Smith did, Canelo is going to need to take a lot of heavy punishment to the body for him to get the victory. Chavez Jr. is more of a body puncher than a head hunter. That’s bad news for Canelo because he likes to try and make guys miss when they aim for his head. It’s not going to work for him if Chavez Jr. is directing most of his punches to his body all night long.

De La Hoya needs to sit back and look at how bad Canelo looked in his last three fights because he really struggled against Smith, Khan and Cotto. The only reason Canelo won those fights is because of his huge size advantage over all of those guys. When I say size, I mean weight advantage. Canelo seems to have a special ability of dehydrating huge amounts of weight and then putting water weight back on.