Canelo-Golovkin takes Sep.16 date in Vegas BEFORE Mayweather-McGregor could grab it

Boxingnew24.com

By Allan Fox: Oscar De La Hoya says he wanted to make sure that he snatched the September 16th date in Las Vegas for the Saul Canelo Alvarez vs. Gennady “GGG” Golovkin BEFORE Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Conor McGregor could take the date. Call it paranoia on De La Hoya’s part if you want, but it’s better safe than sorry.

De La Hoya didn’t want to lose the September 16 date to the Mayweather-McGregor fight. Knowing that Mayweather likes to fight in Vegas rather than anywhere else, De La Hoya effectively boxed him out of position by staging the Canelo vs. Golovkin fight in Vegas. It was a wise move on De La Hoya’s part, because if he staged the Canelo-Golovkin in Texas, California or New York, then Mayweather-McGregor could have scheduled their fight in Las Vegas and dared Golden Boy to keep their September 16 date for the Canelo-Golovkin fight

“We wanted to secure the date because obviously there are rumblings another fight might take place around that same time,” De La Hoya said to the latimes.com. “We had to go to Las Vegas.”

Mayweather can still stage his fight with McGregor in another venue in the U.S on September 16, and they could still potentially force Canelo-Golovkin to move off the date. But with Mayweather preferring to fight in Vegas, it’s less likely that he’ll make that move. Mayweather would be playing hardball if he went ahead and scheduled his fight with McGregor in Vegas anyway, even now with the Canelo and Golovkin fight taking place there on September 16.

De La Hoya has been quite vocal about his opinion that the Mayweather-McGregor fight is bad for boxing, and that it’s not a real fight. De La Hoya views the Canelo-Golovkin fight as a “real fight” and one that’s good for boxing. De La Hoya sees Mayweather’s contest with McGregor as a fight that will attract a lot of fans, but then leave them upset and feeling ripped off afterwards when the fight fails to be a competitive fight with excitement.

De La Hoya views the Mayweather-McGregor fight as one that will send a big ripple through industry, causing the boxing fans to shy away from purchasing other PPV events in the sport for a long time. Mayweather, 40, is just coming back to boxing for the one fight against McGregor before returning into his retirement, so he’s not going to be impacted on future PPV events potentially bringing in viewer fans after his fight with McGregor. Mayweather will likely be gone from the sport and retired for good unless he sees another fight that interests him.

“This is the real fight, the fight that everybody has been wanting to see for the last year and a half,” said De La Hoya in talking about the Canelo-Golovkin fight. “We’re happy we can do it in Las Vegas and we’ll have special events around the fight.”

De La Hoya couldn’t help taking a shot at Mayweather by saying that the Canelo vs. GGG match is a “real fight.” It’s a great fight for sure. The sport of boxing disserves a great fight like these two middleweight punchers. McGregor feels that it’s a real fight against Mayweather. The problem is that McGregor is facing a guy that has been training in boxing since he was 5 years old. Mayweather’s dad had him learning the sport of boxing since he was just a kid.

Mayweather has been training and learning his entire life. You can’t take someone like McGregor and have him training in a boxing gym for 8 months and think he’s going to be able to be competitive with Mayweather. It doesn’t say much about McGregor’s thoughts about boxing that he believes he can learn enough in less than a year’s training of the sport to go out and beat Mayweather. But that’s why the potential is there for a lot of boxing fans to be angry if the Mayweaher-McGregor fight fails to produce excitement.

“It’s good business … you have people coming from all over the world to Vegas, and the fact that we’re going to open it up to 30,000 closed-circuit seats,” said De La Hoya.

The T-Mobile Arena only holds a little over 20,000 fans. That’s not very many for a fight of the magnitude of the Canelo vs. Golovkin fight. But with 30,000 closed circuit seats available for boxing fans, they can still see the fight if they fail to get tickets for the main fight. It’s unclear how excited boxing fans will be in paying to see the Canelo-Golovkin fight on closed circuit TV. If the fans come to Vegas thinking they’re going to see the Canelo vs. Golovkin fight live, they might not be so excited at having to watch it on closed circuit.

Hopefully for the fans that come to Las Vegas, they try and purchase the tickets ahead of time, and don’t just come there thinking they’re going to get tickets for the Golovkin-Canelo fight on the weekend of the fight. The fight is going to sellout quickly. All the tickets will be gone well before September 16. That’s the thing. If De La Hoya had staged the Canelo and Golovkin fight at the 60,000 seat Dodger’s Stadium in California or the 90,000 seat AT&T Stadium in Texas, a lot more boxing fans would be able to see the fight live rather than being stuck watching it on closed circuit or ordering it on PPV.

You can understand why De La Hoya chose to place the fight in Las Vegas though. He obviously felt had to stage the Canelo-Golovkin fight in Vegas on September 16 to keep Mayweather and McGregor from potentially scheduling their own fight in Vegas on the same night, making it pretty much impossible for Canelo, Golovkin and Golden Boy Promotions to keep the fight date. Mayweather vs. McGregor is a going to be a huge fight due to the casual boxing and MMA fans of the two.

“This is the type of fight I have dreamed of since I became a professional boxer,” Golovkin said. “This fight will be at a true championship level and we will give the fans an exciting fight.”

This is Golovkin’s chance to show that he’s a better fighter than Canelo. Golovkin has wanted to show the boxing world that he’s the better fighter of the two for a long time now. He’ll finally get the chance. Golden Boy feels this is the right time to let Canelo fight him. They probably would have like to have let the fight marinate a little more before making it, but Golovkin’s last fight against Danny Jacobs might have persuaded them that they need to make the fight now before he gets beaten.

It’s not that Golovkin has lost his skills all of a sudden and gotten old. It’s more of a case that Golovkin is not going to take it easy by fighting a lot of lesser guys to get sure thing wins. Golovkin wants to fight the best, and the best challengers as well. If Golden Boy didn’t make the fight between Canelo and Golovkin now, we could see Golovkin eventually lose to someone. It would be less of a potential for Canelo to lose, because Golden Boy has shown very little interest in putting him in with dangerous guys. Canelo’s last few opponents shows that pretty clearly with him being matched against a shot Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., Liam Smith and Amir Khan. Those are not the best fighters in their respective divisions.