By Dan Ambrose: It’s looking like Saul Canelo Alvarez will be making his first defense of his WBA/WBC middleweight titles against David Lemieux on December 15.
It’ll be easy for Golden Boy to setup the Canelo vs. Lemieux. As long as Canelo doesn’t get hit too much, he should beat Lemieux with ease. This won’t be the type of fight that we saw with Lemieux beating up a weight drained Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. Lemieux is going to be powerful, but very, very slow. He’ll be a punching bag for Canelo, who will likely go back to the game plan that he used for his first fight with Gennady Golovkin by fighting along the ropes and moving as much as possible.
Trying to sell a fight between Canelo and Lemieux will be difficult for Golden Boy Promotions to do for December. The major reason for that is Lemieux hasn’t done enough to make the fan see him as a real threat to Alvarez. Other than Lemieux’s win over little known Irish fighter Gary ‘Spike’ O’Sullivan, he’s done nothing to make the fans forget his losses to Gennady Golovkin and Billy Joe Saunders. Lemieux lost to Saunders last December on HBO in a fight that was non-competitive.
What’s going to be real bad is if the WBC orders Canelo to fight Jermall Charlo, and he then reverts to form and vacates the belt to avoid the fight like he did in 2016 when he vacated when ordered to fight Triple G.
There was a chance that the World Boxing Council would order Canelo to face his WBC mandatory challenger Jermall Charlo )27-0, 21 KOs) in his next fight, but that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. The WBC has remained strangely silent on the subject of Charlo getting his mandated title shot ever since Canelo won the WBC 160 lb. title in beating Gennady Golovkin by a controversial 12 round majority decision in their rematch on September 15 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Charlo has been waiting 14 months for his title shot, but it looks like he’s going to have to potentially wait longer before the WBC orders it. Lemieux is looking like he has no competition for the fight with Canelo. The Canadian fighter is with Golden Boy, and he’s not nearly the threat to him that Charlo is.
Golovkin and his team are still unhappy with the two controversial fights against Canelo that took place in Las Vegas. They want a third fight, but they’re not going to get one soon. Golovkin is going to have to look in another direction towards the winner of the Saunders vs. Demetrius Andrade fight or the Daniel Jacobs vs. Sergiy Derevyanchenko bout. Golovkin facing one of those guys is going to be a tough fight for him, as it would be for Canelo if he were to fight one of them. However, it doesn’t look like Canelo will be taking any risks in his next fight because Golden Boy likely will be matching him against a non-threat in Lemieux. GGG takes the risky fight whereas Canelo has a soft opponent in Lemieux after winning a controversial decision over the Kazakhstan fighter.