Jaime Munguia rumored to be replacement opponent for Gennady Golovkin

Multiple sources are indicating to ESPN that Gennady Golovkin just might have his May 5th replacement opponent lined up — and it isn’t anyone whose name has been floating around. That person would be 21-year-old junior middleweight Jaime Munguia (28-0, 24 KOs), who would be replacing Canelo Alvarez after he just recently withdrew from the Cinco de Mayo clash.

While Munguia is an undefeated fighter, he’s not a 160-pounder and hasn’t fought anyone near the caliber of Golovkin. In fact he’s only fought outside of Mexico once, knocking out Paul Valenzuela Jr. late last year at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.

Golovkin’s fight is still being slated for HBO PPV, but quite frankly it’s difficult to envision any scenario where this fight would do any kind of traffic in terms of sales. I’d imagine this would be Golvokin’s lowest PPV by a considerable margin — and that’s considering Golovkin-Lemieux and Golovkin-Jacobs only did 150K and 170k buys respectively on PPV.

At this point it seems we’re just waiting to see if the Nevada State Athletic Commission will approve Munguia as Golovkin’s replacement, which is sort of unfortunate as prospective fights against people like Demetrius Andrade and Sergiy Derevyanchenko were much more attractive opponents from a competitive standpoint. They would also be much more dangerous opponents, which just might be the whole point of looking elsewhere.

So if this indeed goes through it would seem that Team Golovkin is just biding their time with a stay-busy fight until Canelo Alvarez is cleared to fight again, which is expected to be in time for Mexican Independence Day weekend this September.