By Sean Jones: Oscar De La Hoya says he’s not worried about Floyd Mayweather Jr. potentially coming out of retirement to stage a comeback in the octagon in front of the Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez vs. Gennady ‘GGG’ Golovkin 2 rematch on HBO pay-per-view on May 5th.
De La Hoya is predicting the Canelo-GGG rematch will do 3 million pay-per-view buys on HBO. Further, De La Hoya sees Mayweather’s talk of him staging a comeback in the UFC as something that will never happen.
Mayweather posted 2 videos last week on social media showing him packing back and forth inside the octagon, and hinting that he’ll be making a comeback for an MMA fight. However, Mayweather will need to sign for a fight soon if he wants to take away PPV buys from the Canelo vs. Golovkin fight on May 5th. The last time Canelo fought Triple G in September of last year, Mayweather scheduled a fight against UFC star Conor McGregor on August 26th, placing the fight 3 weeks in front of Golden Boy’s PPV card.
Mayweather vs. McGregor went for $100 per household on Showtime PPV. Whether the Mayweather-McGregor fight ultimately hurt the amount of PPV buys the Canelo vs. GGG fight took in 3 weeks later on September 16th is unknown. Canelo-GGG brought in a 1.3 million buys on HBO. If Mayweather placing his fight against McGregor ahead of the Canelo vs. Golovkin fight did hurt the match, it probably didn’t hurt it too much, because it was still a huge success with the boxing fans. The outcome wasn’t great with the judges scoring the Canelo vs. Golovkin fight a 12 round draw, but the fight made a lot of money for both fighters.
“You know Floyd, him and his attention. He can’t let anybody else have attention, so he’s done this [posting video on social media hinting at a comeback in the octagon]. Of course, but it’s fine,” De La Hoya said to TMZ.com when asked if Mayweather enjoys trying to mess him up by posting a video in front of the news of Golden Boy’s Canelo Alvarez vs. Gennady Golovkin rematch for May 5th.
It’s obviously not fine for De La Hoya if Mayweather decides to go forward and schedule a rematch against McGregor and place the fight directly in front of the Canelo vs. Gennady 2 rematch. Mayweather will likely charge $100 per household for his rematch with McGregor in the octagon, and that’s a lot of money for fans to be paying. If boxing fans pay $100 to see the Mayweather-McGregor fight in an MMA type of fight from 1-3 weeks ahead of De La Hoya’s card headlined by Canelo vs. Golovkin on May 5th, it can’t help but to badly cripple that card. Canelo and Golovkin will still pull in a tremendous amount of PPV buys that will further enrich them, but they probably won’t make as much as they would if they didn’t have Mayweather undercutting them again.
Mayweather is going to need to move quickly in negotiating the rematch with McGregor if he wants to hurt the Canelo-GGG rematch on May 5th. There’s only 3 months to go before the Canelo vs. Golovkin fight. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for Mayweather and McGregor to get a deal negotiated for them to cripple that fight. I don’t think McGregor cares really about hurting De La Hoya’s May 5th card on HBO PPV. McGregor just wants to fight Mayweather a second time so he can beat him in the UFC and prove that he’s the better fighter when allowed to use his entire fighting arsenal. McGregor, 29, is the only guy that is worthwhile for Mayweather to fight in the UFC, as the organization lacks big stars right now. Ronda Rousey and McGregor were/are the UFC’s biggest names, and neither of them has competed in a long time.
De La Hoya is betting that Mayweather’s ego won’t let him take a fight against McGregor inside the octagon. It would be a very tough pill for the soon to be 41-year-old Mayweather to have to swallow for him to be seen tapping out against McGregor in the octagon. McGregor could basically make the beat down of Mayweather a slow one if he wanted to by kicking him and roughing him up for as long as possible to try and inflict a lot of pain before forcing him to quit.
It could be a painfully embarrassing loss for Mayweather if he dares take on McGregor in the UFC. A really bad loss for Mayweather could leave a lasting image in eyes of lot of boxing fans. It would be like De La Hoya’s last fight in which he was beaten up and stopped by Manny Pacquiao in 2008. De La Hoya made the mistake of facing Pacquiao in his prime at 147, and he ended up losing badly to him. For Mayweather, it could be a much more painful defeat because MMA is a violent sport with lighter gloves a lot more ways of getting hurt than in boxing. Mayweather could come out of the fight with a broken nose, a busted limb or a cauliflower ear. Just training for the McGregor fight will be hard enough for Mayweather. He’ll have to get some good MMA fighters to training for painful 8 weeks. Mayweather won’t have any advantage over those guys, because he knows nothing of how to grapple and doesn’t know all the different kicks and submission holds the fighters use in that sport.
”Our fight is going to do 3 million homes, so we’re good,” De La Hoya said in predicting Canelo-GGG 2 will do 3 million PPV buys on HBO. ”He’ll never do it,” De La Hoya said when asked if Mayweather will make bigger news if he competes in the UFC before May 5th.
De La Hoya is probably right about Mayweather NEVER taking a fight in the octagon. However, Ii’s probably wishful thinking on De La Hoya’s part for him to be predicting 3 million PPV buys for the Canelo vs. GGG rematch on May 5. I don’t think it’s going to bring nearly that many buys. One thing that will potentially hurt the rematch from bringing in more PPV buys on HBO, besides the threat of Mayweather staging a comeback, is the controversial outcome of the first fight on September 16th.
Boxing fans in great numbers saw the 12 round draw that the judges scored the first Canelo-GGG fight as being a robbery. Many of those boxing fans thought Golovkin won the fight, but since it was Canelo’s promoters at Golden Boy that put on the card, GGG wasn’t given the win. If those fans don’t see Golovkin having much of a chance of being given a fair shake in the rematch in terms of the scoring by the judges, the fans won’t bother ordering it again. Look at the Andre Ward vs. Sergey Kovalev matches as an example of fans not wanting to waste their money by ordering the second fight after the first one ended in controversy with Ward winning a questionable 12 round unanimous decision in November 2016. The second fight turned out to be even more controversial with Ward winning by landing what appeared to be 3 consecutive low blows. Ward-Kovalev 2 brought in fewer PPV buys on HBO. If the fans have doubts whether the judges will score the Golovkin vs. Canelo 2 rematch fairly, the fans are going to save their money by not ordering it on HBO PPV. That’s why I doubt the second fight will bring anything close to 3 million buys. De La Hoya is dreaming. If history is any guide, the Canelo-Golvokin rematch will bring in fewer buys than the first fight. Instead of 1.3 million PPV buys on HBO, it might bring in closer to 1 million. That’s not much of a drop off, so it’s not all bad. But 1 million is far away from the 3 million that De La Hoya is predicting.
De La Hoya would be very smart to make sure the second Canelo-GGG fight is stage in a different city as the first fight, which took place in Las Vegas, Nevada. If a lot of boxing fans think Golovkin has no chance of winning a decision against Canelo in Vegas, then they’re going to save their money by not ordering it on HBO PPV. De La Hoya should think about that and look to stage the fight in New York instead. De La Hoya doesn’t want to lose a lot of PPV buys by staging the second Canelo-GGG fight in the same venue where controversy struck last time. That would be a dumb move by De La Hoya, because if the second is controversial as well and it favors Canelo being saved from another loss, it’s going to leave a bad taste in the mouths of many boxing fans, which will see the Mexican fighter as someone who is continually saved from losing by controversial judging. There are a lot of fans that believe Canelo should have lost to Austin Trout, Golovkin and Erislandy Lara. Canelo has never been on the receiving end of a decision where he was seen as being robbed. It’s always worked in Canelo’s favor with him either winning a controversial decision or getting a controversial draw in the case of his fight against GGG last September.
