By Craig Daly: Oscar De La Hoya is blaming Canelo Alvarez’s loss to WBA light heavyweight champion Dmitry Bivol squarely on the shoulders of Matchroom Boxing promoter Eddie Hearn. He’s the one that made the Bivol vs. Canelo fight, and De La Hoya feels it was a blunder on his part.
De La Hoya says he wanted to match his fighter Gilberto ‘Zurdo’ Ramirez against Bivol. If he were still promoting Canelo, he wouldn’t have considered matching him against Bivol because it was a no-win situation. He wasn’t popular enough for him to be relevant to the fans in the States.
De La Hoya is failing to understand that Canelo had been feasting on irrelevant champions at 168 that casual boxing fans had never heard of before.
Canelo didn’t care whether the champions were famous or not. He just wanted their titles so that he could add to his credentials. That’s why we saw Canelo fighting these little-known 168-lb belt holders: Rocky Fielding, Callum Smith, Billy Joe Saunders, and Caleb Plant. Like Bivol, those champions aren’t household names to casual boxing fans in the U.S.
Some would argue that Canelo’s purpose in going up to 175 to fight Bivol was another excuse to duck #1 WBC David Benavidez because he’s on his tail, demanding a world title shot.
Canelo (57-2-2, 39 KOs) had hoped to become the undisputed champion at 175, so he chose to fight Bivol.
It’s believed that Canelo picked Bivol (20-0, 11 KOs) because he was viewed as the weakest power-wise among the three champions at light heavyweight.
The only thing Canelo had to worry about against Bivol was getting outboxed, which is what happened.
“No. Never. Never, because it was a lose-lose situation,” said Oscar De La Hoya to MMAFighting when asked if he agreed with Canelo Alvarez being matched against Dmitry Bivol.
“Nobody knew Bivol whatsoever,” De La Hoya continued. “I would have promoted Bivol to have a bigger name because nobody knew who he was before he fought Canelo.
Had Canelo chosen one of the other two 175-lb champions, Artur Beterbiev or Joe Smith Jr, there’s a chance that they would have tried to finish him.
They would have gone after Canelo without let up and wouldn’t have backed off the way Bivol did when he flurried on the star in the fifth. Backing off is not in the DNA of Beterbiev or Joe Smith.
Hence, Canelo was smart enough to know the result had he picked either of those two fighters first.
“He was irrelevant. He was nobody,” said De La Hoya about Bivol not being a household name in the boxing world when he fought Canelo on May 7th.
“He doesn’t really know the fight game, and he got Canelo beat,” said Oscar about promoter Eddie Hearn, who made the match-up with Bivol.
It’s not Hearn’s fault that Canelo chose to fight Bivol. That was Canelo’s decision to fight him, not Hearn’s.
If it were up to Hearn, he probably would have suggested that he stay at 168 and given the boxing world the fight they all wanted to see between Canelo and Gennadiy Golovkin last May instead of Bivol.
Hearn has nothing to do with the selection process because if he did, Canelo would have fought Golovkin. Hearn can’t say no to Canelo because he’s not calling the shots. The Mexican star and his manager/trainer Eddy Reynoso are the ones that pick out the opponents.
“Hearn didn’t do no justice to Canelo when he faced him against Bivol,” said De La Hoya. “It was the wrong style. Las Vegas had no buzz whatsoever. I was actually sitting ringside, supporting Canelo,” said Oscar.
It appears De La Hoya is hoping that Canelo will choose to return to his Golden Boy Promotions stable. If he were to do that, it would pump life into De La Hoya’s company because without him, and there seems to be an empty vacuum.
Although De La Hoya has a handful of good fighters, they’re not being matched against upper-tier opposition. They’re rotting on the vine, in other words.
