By Jim Dower: Tom Loeffler says he’s still waiting on Saul Canelo Alvarez to let his promoters at Golden Boy Promotions know that he’s interested in facing Gennady Golovkin next in a rematch on May 5. Loeffler states that once Canelo lets Golden Boy know that he wants the Golovkin fight, the negotiations can be completely quickly.
(Photo credit: HBO Boxing)
The main issue is whether the 27-year-old Canelo wants the rematch. The only reason Canelo wouldn’t want a second fight with Golovkin right now is to let the match marinate a little more. Canelo has the possibility to face the winner of the Billy Joe Saunders vs. David Lemieux fight. Those 2 are facing each other on December 16. Saunders holds the WBO middleweight title. Canelo fighting the Saunders-Lemieux winner won’t give him the huge payday he made fighting Golovkin last September, but it will give him a chance to win the WBO middleweight title. Above that, it will allow for more time to help build the Canelo-GGG rematch to make it bigger than it is right now.
It might be a little too early for Canelo and Golovkin to face each other so soon. The fight needs to be marketed more over time the way the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao fight was. That fight marinated for 6 years from 2009 to 2015, and it eventually made both fighters huge amounts of money.
“As soon as Eric [Gomez] says they have a deal with Canelo, him and I can come to an agreement pretty quickly,” said Loeffler to Fighthub about the Canelo-Golovkin rematch. “We’re just waiting on the green light from Oscar and Eric. If for some reason the fight doesn’t happen, we have dates on hold with HBO in March and April. That’s not the direction we want to go in. If that’s the case, we’ll try and make the best fight out there. Until Canelo says he’s not going to do the rematch, there’s no sense of me talking about other opponents,” said Loeffler.
If the Canelo-Golovkin rematch doesn’t get made, Loeffler says Golovkin would face the best possible opponent in March or April. This is where the risk comes in. If Golovkin does the face the best possible opponent, then he could be fighting Danny Jacobs, Jermall Charlo or Sergiy Derevyanchenko in March or April. Those are fights that Golovkin could lose. Jacobs almost beat Golovkin earlier this year in March. Triple G won a narrow 12 round decision. The undefeated former IBF junior middleweight champion Charlo is Golovkin’s WBC mandatory, and he might even be a better fighter than Jacobs. Charlo would be a high-risk fight for Golovkin. Derevyanchenko is Golovkin’s IBF mandatory challenger. He might be the toughest of the bunch. It would be a grueling fight for Golovkin to face Derevyanchenko. Even if Golovkin wins, he’ll absorb a lot of punishment along the way. Derevyanchenko is younger than Golovkin, and he’s a very tough fighter. If Golovkin loses to any of those guys or if he looks bad in winning, it will hurt the rematch against Canelo. The fight would still likely get made, but there would be less interest from the boxing public at that point. The fans would prefer to see Canelo fight the guy that beats Golovkin.