By Jim Dower: Without question the September 16 fight between Saul Canelo Alvarez and Gennady “GGG” Golovkin will be one of the biggest fights in 2017 if not the biggest. Golden Boy Promotions CEO Oscar De La Hoya believes the fight will be big enough to where he won’t even need to promote it in order to attract a huge audience on HBO PPV. We’ll see about that.
Canelo-Golovkin will have a big bar to jump over if it’s to outdo the Canelo vs. Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. PPV numbers, which are said to be estimated over 1 million buys on HBO. Golovkin hasn’t proven himself popular enough to bring in more than 175,000 buys top in his two previous fights on HBO PPV.
This is going to be a fight that should bring in big PPV numbers depending on if Golovkin’s diverse fans base comes out to purchase the fight in big numbers. We already know that Canelo’s boxing fans will purchase his fights pretty much no matter what level of opponent he faces. We saw that with Canelo’s mismatches against Liam Smith, Amir Khan and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr.
“In fact, this fight does not need promotion, so to speak, because it promotes itself,” said De La Hoya to ESPN Deportes. “Everyone knows it’s going to be a war, a fight of many blows. Obviously, nothing is easy, and we must use our intelligence, the promotional machinery, the work team of the company to launch an advertising campaign all over the world.”
A tour of the U.S is a must to help promote the Canelo vs. Golovkin fight. It would be great if the tour hits more than just Las Vegas, Los Angeles and New York, which is what most tours seem to focus on. There are a lot more states than New York, Nevada and California. If Golden Boy wants to maximize earnings for the Canelo-Golovkin fight, they need to expand the tour to go to other states like Texas at the minimum. It’s predictable which states the tour will visit. It’s always California, Nevada and New York, and rarely Texas.
Adding a good undercard would be great to help attract boxing fans to purchase the fight. We saw how the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao fight failed to include a good undercard with it. While it would be nice if Golden Boy and K2 Promotions put together a great undercard to help make the Canelo-Golovkin fight card a great one, I don’t see it happening. I think their likely going to put the entire emphasis of the card on just the main event and selling that fight.
The press tour to sell the Canelo vs. Golovkin fight will likely eat up the money that otherwise would have been spent on the undercard. The promoters should put money into assembling a great undercard, but that’s pretty rare nowadays. When you have a big fight like this one, the promoters tend to stick their prospects on the card and put them in against poor opposition in order to showcase them to the casual boxing fans. In other words, the prospects are put in weak opponents to make them look better than they actually are.
The venue for the fight is expected to be in Las Vegas, though De La Hoya is still looking at the possibility of staging it in Texas, New York or England.
“It may be in Las Vegas or Dallas, but we also have proposals from Madison Square Garden, New York, and England,” said De La Hoya. “It’s a promotion that started some time ago, and at the end of Canelo’s fight against Chavez, we announce that Saúl and Gennady Golovkin will face the next 16 of September.”
The Canelo-Golovkin fight will probably take place in Las Vegas. It would play into Canelo’s hands to have the fight staged there, because Golovkin’s fans are in California and New York. But it doesn’t matter if all the boxing fans are Canelo fans on the night of the fight, because Golovkin fights well in hostile venues. We saw that in his fight against Kell Brook last September when Golovkin walked the British fighter down and wound up stopping him in the 5th. Brook’s British fans seemed to encourage Golovkiin to attack more instead of attack less.
The fans worked against Brook because it made him too brave for his own good by him choosing to attack Golovkin instead of playing it safe, which is what he should have been doing. We saw how Danny Jacobs mostly played it safe in his fight with Golovkin last March, and that cost him the fight. Jacobs didn’t want to try and attack Golovkin despite having a considerable weight advantage of possibly 15 pounds on the night of the fight.
Canelo’s game plan for the Golovkin fight will likely be for him to box. However, Canelo is one of those types of fighters that fights with emotion based on the cheering of the fans. We could see Canelo chuck his game plan into the garbage if the boxing fans cheer loudly enough each time he lands a shot. The problem with Canelo getting caught in a war with Golovkin is the fact that he’s never had to take the kind of power shots in a fight that he’ll have to take against GGG. We don’t know if Canelo can take a body shot because he’s not fought anybody that threw body shots other than Liam Smith, and he wasn’t able to throw many shots before he faded and ended up getting knocked out.
“Canelo does not know how to step back and GGG does not know how to fight in reverse either,” said De La Hoya. ”They both like to go find their opponent, throw blows, exchange, and their respective boxing histories indicate that the fight Has a great chance of finishing by knockout,” said De La Hoya.
I don’t think Canelo will be able to knockout Golovkin. I can’t see that happening in this fight. Golovkin takes a shot too well for him to be knocked out by Canelo. The fighter that needs to worry about being knocked out is Canelo. Golovkin has one punch power, and he could knockout Canelo if he lands a shot hard enough. Canelo is more of the type of fighter that needs to throw a lot of shots repeatedly for him to knock out an opponent. We saw that in Canelo’s fight against Alfredo Angulo. The fights where Canelo got quick knockouts were against fighters with a history of being knocked out like Amir Khan and James Kirkland.