By Jeff Aronow: With less than three months to go before Oscar De La Hoya’s return to the ring on July 3rd, he still has yet to find an opponent for his Triller pay-per-view fight on that date.
Although former UFC lightweight champion Eddie Alvarez mentioned that he’s a possibility for the 48-year-old De La Hoya’s fight on that date, Triller Chief Boxing Officer Peter Kahn said he’s not sure that he’s going to be the one that will be facing the former six-division world champion.
It’s important that De La Hoya (39-6, 30 KOs) face someone that both the boxing and MMA fans are familiar with, and unfortunately, the 37-year-old Eddie Alvarez doesn’t check both of those boxes.
It’s fair to say that most boxing fans have never heard of Alvarez before. The ones that have heard of him know him from his knockout loss to Conor McGregor in 2016.
That was a long time ago. Alvarez’s career in the UFC bottomed out ages ago, and he’s not had the type of success that one would need for him to be useful as an opponent for De La Hoya.
“You know, it’s interesting. I can tell you that Oscar De La Hoya is going to be on Triller,” said Kahn to the AK & Barak show. “But I’m not sure that Eddie Alvarez is going to be the opponent for that fight.”
“I saw that Eddie Alvarez had expressed that he was in negotiations, but right now there’s no opponent, no opponent for Oscar De La Hoya.”
The ‘Golden Boy’ De La Hoya last fought in 2008, losing to Manny Pacquiao by an eighth-round knockout in a one-sided fight.
That was 13 years ago. De La Hoya’s last win over a significant name opponent came in 2006 when he stopped the shell of Ricardo Mayorga in the sixth round.
By that point in Mayorga’s career, he’d already been recently beaten by Cory Spinks and Felix Trinidad, and he’d been sufficiently softened up by the time that De La Hoya picked him to fight.
It’s unclear whether De La Hoya would have been able to beat the Mayorga that twice defeated Vernon Forrest in 2003.
De La Hoya said recently that he’d be taking on a popular former MMA fighter. Eddie Alvarez definitely falls short of being popular. There are two names in the MMA world that would be perfect for De La Hoya to fight on July 3rd and that’s Khabib Nurmagomedov and Conor McGregor.
The training videos of McGregor that he’s been posting on his social media site would suggest that he could be someone that De La Hoya might face. McGregor is an advanced fighter, though, and he might have too much youth and vitality for an old De La Hoya to beat.
Other options for De La Hoya’s July 3rd fight:
- Floyd Mayweather Jr – He posted training last Sunday of him running in La Vegas. However, if Mayweather were the option for De La Hoya, they would have likely announced the fight already
- Anderson Silva
- Julio Cesar Chavez