By Sean Jones: Saul Canelo Alvarez chose to gloat after his controversial 12 round majority decision over WBA/WBC middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin last Saturday night at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. The 21,965 fans that saw the fight at ringside didn’t think much of the scores, as many of them booed the decision loudly when the results were announced.
With Canelo and Golovkin both having suffered cuts in the fight, a rematch between them is out of the question for December. A third Canelo-Golovkin fight will likely need to be pushed back to May of 2019. If Canelo does fight in December, it would likely be against someone that is beatable like David Lemieux. He’s co-promoted by Golden Boy Promotions and coming off of a big 1st round knockout win over Gary ‘Spike’ O’Sullivan last Saturday night on the Canelo-GGG 2 undercard at the T-Mobile Arena. Canelo suffered a bad cut over his left eye during the fight last Saturday. It would likely be too risky for Canelo to get back inside the ring to start training with the cut before the end of the year. With the punishment Canelo took in the fight with Golovkin, it’s better than he rest until next May before he fights again, no matter who that would be against. It’s more likely than not that when Canelo does fight again, it will be against Golovkin and not against Lemieux. There’s too much money still on the table for Canelo to walk away from his rivalry with Golovkin. Having the fights always taking place in Las Vegas seems to give Canelo a big advantage when it comes to he judging.
Despite many boxing fans feeling that Golovkin (38-1-1, 34 KOs) had been robbed once again by the Las Vegas judges, Canelo (50-1-2, 34 KOs) insisted that he was the better man in the rematch with the 36-year-old Golovkin on HBO pay-per-view. Golovkin out-landed Canelo and appeared to out-box him, but he was backing up constantly, making the rounds difficult to score.
The three Nevada judges’ scores were as follows:
– 114-114 – Glenn Feldman
– 115-113 – Steve Weisfield
– 115-113 – Dave Moretti
Boxing News 24 had Golovkin winning clearly with an 8 rounds to 4 score. Some of the rounds could have gone either way, but no matter how many times we could look at the fight, GGG was the better fighter. Golovkin got the better of Canelo in the 12th in a round that the judges scored for the Mexican fighter. The scoring was subjective just like the first Canelo-GGG fight last year in September, and like that fight, Golovkin appeared to win in the eyes of many boxing fans. In looking at social media last night and today, Golovkin is clearly the one that is overwhelmingly being picked as the winner of the rematch last night. In the eyes of the fans, Canelo was out-boxed and came out second best. The Nevada judges scored it for Canelo, but in the court of popular opinion, Golovkin beat the Mexican star – again.
“I showed my victory with facts. He was the one who was backing up,” Canelo said in gloating afterwards. “I feel satisfied because I gave a great fight. It was a clear victory.”
Unfortunately for Canelo, it wasn’t a clear victory for him. In fact, it overwhelmingly was seen as another loss for the popular Golden Boy Promotions star. A day after the fight, Canelo is seen as being given a gift decision based on his star power rather than what he did inside the ring. That’s not to say that Golovkin deserved a lopsided decision over the 28-year-old Alvarez. The fight was close enough for Golovkin to win by four rounds, so it wasn’t a one-sided fight by any stretch of the imagination. Dan Rafael of ESPN scored it a draw. He didn’t see Canelo winning. However, most boxing fans saw Golovkin doing more than enough to rate the victory. Teddy Atlas of ESPN, who had predicted a win for Canelo, saw Golovkin deserving the victory by a 117-111 score. Atlas saw he fight as a robbery.
Canelo landed 202 of 622 punches for a 33 percent connect percentage, according to CompuBox. GGG landed 234 of 879 punches for a 27 percent connect percentage. Golovkin landed more shots in the majority of the rounds, connecting more in 8 of 12 of the rounds. However, most of the punches that Golovkin landed were jabs. Judges tend to weigh power punches more heavily than jabs when they score rounds.
Canelo didn’t land a lot of good shots each round, but being able to land one or two hard ones was enough for the judges to give him a lot of the rounds. The pro-Canelo crowd obviously didn’t hurt. They were cheering each time Canelo would land a good shot. When Golovkin would land a hard punch, there wasn’t as much noise from the crowd. Having the rematch take place in Las Vegas was a smart move by Golden Boy, because it guaranteed that the crowd would be in Canelo’s favor and that in turn would mean more cheering for him. As we saw in this fight, the cheering for Canelo didn’t hurt him when it came to the way the Nevada judges scored the fight.
“I’m not going to say who won tonight, because the victory belongs to Canelo, according to the judges,” Golovkin said. ”I thought it was a very good fight for the fans and very exciting. I thought I fought better than he did. I congratulate Canelo and his team. Today, he’s a champion. I come back, guys,” GGG said.
Golovkin, 36, still felt that he deserved the victory, but he wasn’t going to complain about the decision as much as he did in the first fight. It would have been a bad look on the Kazakhstan’s part to complain about a second decision against Canelo, even though the results of this fight were just as controversial as the first Canelo-Golovkin match on September 16, 2017.
GGG felt that he was controlling the fight with Canelo despite the Mexican star not using as much movement as he did in the first match. Golovkin believed that with his jab and the boxing he was doing that he deserved to have his hand raised. Golovkin didn’t want to stick around the ring after the results were announced and complain to the fans, so he exited the ring hastily.
”I felt very confident in the fight, landing jabs,” Golovkin said. ”Even though he wasn’t running this time, it doesn’t mean he was controlling the fight. We were controlling the fight.”
The loss for Golovkin ends his eight-year run as a middleweight champion, and prevented him from breaking former middleweight champion Bernard Hopkins’ record of 21 title defenses, which he now shares. The fight showed how difficult it is to break a record when fighting in an arguably more popular fighter’s home venue. Canelo is from Mexico, but he’s been fighting in Las Vegas for many years, and he brings a great deal of money to the city each time he fights there. Golovkin has now fought just twice in Vegas during his 14-year pro career, so clearly he was in a one down position from the very start of the fight when it came to his chances of winning a decision.
The scoring of the judges giving Canelo the 12th was perhaps even more controversial than the 118-110 score given by one of the judges in favor of Alvarez in the first fight. Golovkin appeared to clearly win the 12th round last night, but the judges giving Canelo the round gave him the victory. If the judges had scored the 12th for Gennady, then the fight would have been a draw.
Moments after the fight, the 28-year-old Canelo said he would listen to the boxing public and give Golovkin a third fight if he wishes. Alas, there isn’t a lot of fans calling for a third Canelo vs. GGG fight as of a day after the fight. The general consensus judging by the comments on social media is that Golovkin should move on, because he’s not going to ever be given a decision win over Canelo. The fans don’t want to see a third fight. That’s not going to keep Canelo’s promoters at Golden Boy from reaching out to Golovkin’s promoter Tom Loeffler of K2 in looking to make a third fight, because the options for big money fights for both of the stars are limited. Canelo won’t make huge money fighting the top middleweights – Ryota Murata, Jermall Charlo, Sergiy Derevyanchenko, Billy Joe Saunders or Daniel Jacobs – and there’s a good chance he’ll lose to some of them. Saunders, Charlo and Jacobs are bad match-ups for Canelo. They’re taller than him by quite a bit, quick, young and powerful.
Charlo and Jacobs wouldn’t be nearly as hesitant to fire power shots at Canelo as Golovkin was. Since boxing is a business, it’s almost certain that Golden Boy will look to hurriedly make a third fight between Canelo and Golovkin before the Kazakhstan fighter gets much older and is beaten by someone else. Golden Boy made GGG wait three years before they finally matched Canelo against him in 2017. When Golovkin was in his prime at 33-years-old, Golden Boy didn’t want to make the Canelo fight with him. Now that Golovkin has aged, they’re not going to let him move on because he’s someone that Canelo can have moments against.
Canelo still appeared to lose both fights against Golovkin in this writer’s opinion, but he was at least competitive with him. If Canelo moves on against someone like Jermall Charlo, he might lose badly to him and make considerably less money. Unlike Golovkin, Charlo is only 28, so Golden Boy can’t wait three years before they make a fight involving him. I don’t think Golden Boy will let Canelo anywhere near Charlo for many years if ever, but it won’t help if they try and wait him out hoping he gets older like many boxing fans think they did with Golovkin. Charlo is too close to Canelo’s age for them to wait. The only good thing that would come of Golden Boy keeping Canelo away from Charlo is that he won’t have the chance of losing to him if they drag their feet and not make the fight.
”That was a great fight, but in the end, it was a victory for Mexico,” Canelo said. “And again, it was an opportunity, and I want to shout out to my opponent, the best in the sport of boxing. I am a great fighter, and I showed it tonight. If the people want another round, I’ll do it again.”
With Canelo’s victory over GGG, it means that the negotiations for a third fight will likely be tilted heavily in Alvarez’s favor once again like in the first fight. So instead of Golovkin receiving a 55-45 split like he did in this fight, he might be looking at going back to the previous 70-30 split that he got for the first fight. That’s still a lot of money for Golovkin to make in getting 30 percent of the revenue for a fight with Canelo, but there might not be nearly as much money as the first two fights. This was the second controversial decision, and when you have that many questionable decisions in a row, it turns off a lot of boxing fans making them not want to continue to purchase fights between those two fighters. There’s still obviously more money for Canelo and GGG to make fighting each other than there would be for them to fight someone else other than Floyd Mayweather Jr., but the money likely won’t be as good for a third fight. As the loser of fight number two, Golovkin will have to be satisfied with whatever he gets from Golden Boy in the rematch.
Golovkin might need to swallow his pride a bit and accept a much smaller split than he got for this fight, even though he was considered the winner of the fight in the eyes of most boxing fans. The fans arguably don’t count as much when it comes to negotiations. What counts is which fighter won the previous fight, and that means Canelo is in the driver’s seat with his controversial victory. With the defeat, Golovkin’s promoter Tom Loeffler won’t be in the position to negotiate the third fight for a neutral city like New York. It’s unclear whether Loeffler would have even bothered pushing hard to have a third fight take place outside of Las Vegas even if GGG had won the fight last Saturday. But the loss for Golovkin removes any chance of Loeffler being able to negotiate hard to have the third fight take place outside of the state of Nevada. Golovkin will need to fight much harder in the third fight, if there is a third one, to try and win somehow, as he’s not done enough in the eyes of the Nevada judges for him to win in his two fights with Canelo. Golovkin might have done more than enough in the eyes of the boxing public to deserve wins in both of his fights with Canelo, but not in the eyes of the Nevada judges.
