Canelo-Golovkin venue to be decided soon

Boxingnews24.com

By Dan Ambrose: Golden Boy Promotions boss Oscar De La Hoya is taking his time scouting out the best possible venue for the September 16th fight between Golden Boy’s golden goose Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (49-1-1, 34 KOs) and the middleweight division’s best fighter in Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (37-0, 33 KOs).

De La Hoya wants to make the most money possible in selecting the venue for the fight, and he’s currently weighing options to stage the fight in New York, Texas and Las Vegas, Nevaa. There’s an outside chance the Canelo-Golovkin fight could take place in London, England.

ESPN’s boxing guy Dan Rafael says that it could be several more weeks before a venue is decided for the Canelo vs. Golovkin fight. The possible venues are as follows: Madison Square Garden in New York, Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles, California and AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.

Having the Canelo vs. Golovkin fight staged at the 90,000 seat AT&T Stadium or the 90,000 seat Wembley Stadium would allow the highest number of boxing fans to see the fight. However, it might not bring in as much money as having the Canelo-Golovkin fight take place in Las Vegas. If the idea is for De La Hoya to make the most amount of money, then he’ll likely go in that direction rather than putting it in a venue where the most amounts of boxing fans can attend the fight. Dodgers Stadium seats 60,000 fans. That would be a great venue as well if De La Hoya wants to bring in a lot of fans near the Golden Boy headquarters in Los Angeles.

The average boxing fans don’t care where the Canelo-Golovkin fight will be taking place, because they’re going to watch the contest on HBO PPV. It would be good for the fans if the venue for the fight were one that had an even split of boxing fans of the two fighters instead of the fans being just for Canelo. What we don’t want is the judges for the fight being influenced by crowd noise and giving the decision to Canelo or Golovkin based on the cheering of the fans. Golden Boy Promotion are almost surely going to pick a venue that will work in Canelo’s favor rather than it being one that is of equal fans of the two fighters.

What Golovkin has going for him is power to make sure that the fight doesn’t go to the scorecards like his last one against Danny Jacobs. Golovkin saw how that one turned out, as it enabled Jacobs to complain bitterly that he thought he should have been crowned the winner of the fight by the judges instead of Golovkin. Months later, Jacobs is still complaining that he should have won the Golovkin fight. That’s what happens when Golovkin doesn’t knock out an opponent. They can complain to the boxing public, and then push for a rematch, which doesn’t make financial sense for Golovkin. With that in mind, it’s important that Golovkin knocks Canelo out in this fight if he wants to escape with his unbeaten record intact, because it’s going to be hard for him to get a decision over a popular fighter like Canelo, especially in a venue that favors him. Golovkin will need to put pressure on Canelo from the start of the fight to get him to drain down to the point where he’s ready to be knocked out.

Canelo is about the same size as David Lemieux, a fighter that GGG jabbed at will in beating him in 2015. Canelo doesn’t have much of a jab. Canelo throws it at times, but it looks like it takes a lot of him. Canelo doesn’t look comfortable when using his using his jab because it requires him to lean forward and it looks like it tires him. I don’t expect Canelo to throw many jabs in the Golovkin fight on September 16. The main thing that Canelo will likely do is wait on Golovkin to get near enough to him for him to land his left hook and right hands.

Canelo throws those shots with a lot of speed and power. If Golovkin gets in close, Canelo will have a good chance of landing those shots and perhaps get the better of him with his hand speed advantage. Golovkin can take that away from Canelo by jabbing from the outside all night long. The only fallback for Golovkin in choosing to jab instead of throwing power shots is it will put him in a position where he could lose rounds.

We saw that with Erislandy Lara, Austin Trout and Miguel Cotto in their fights with Canelo. They all out-jabbed Canelo and landed more shots than him, but the judges still gave the rounds to Canelo because he would land 1 or 2 hard shots in those rounds. The judges were more impressed with Canelo landing a tiny handful of punches than him getting hit repeatedly with head-snapping jabs. The scoring for all three of those fights were in favor of Canelo despite him getting nailed with repeated jabs.

What this means for Golovkin is he’s going to need to make sure that he throws enough power shots to get the attention of the judges, because jabbing alone likely won’t be enough for him to be given the victory. In theory, it should be enough for Golovkin to win rounds if he’s picking Canelo apart with jabs the way that Floyd Mayweather Jr. did in his win over the Golden Boy star in 2013, but I don’t think it will be.

Canelo is pretty popular, and it’s not easy to beat a popular fighter unless you really blow them out in a one-sided fashion from start to finish. That brings me back to Golovkin probably needing a knockout to get the ‘W’ for this fight with Canelo. With the boxing fans cheering for Canelo, and him being so popular for the sport, it’s up to GGG if he can make sure that the judges don’t have a say so in the outcome of this fight.

This is going to be an interesting fight to see how well Canelo can do without fighting at a catch-weight that helps him and hurts his opponent. Golovkin vs. Canelo will be taking place at the full weight for the division at 160 pounds. Canelo will need to deal with someone that has some actual skills, power and who won’t be weight drained like we saw with Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. in his fight against Canelo this month.

Golovkin is going to be going after Canelo from the start of the fight. Canelo has stamina problems when facing guys that force him to fight at a fast pace. Canelo might wilt under pressure from Golovkin if he forces the red-haired Mexican star to fight hard for a full three minutes of each round.

Golovkin, 35, is really looking forward to the fight. He’s taking some time off after his grueling fight against Daniel Jacobs on March 18 of this year. Golovkin was thinking of fighting on June 10 against WBO middleweight champion Billy Joe Saunders in a unification fight, but h decided to rest up and recover from the Jacobs match. It’s good that Golovkin is doing that, because he looked over-trained for the Jacobs fight.

Triple G has had a lot of fights lately, and he needs to slow the pace of his fights down now that he’s getting a little older. The fights themselves haven’t been that tough for Golovkin recently, but his training camps have been hard with all the strenuous work he’s had to do, not to mention the sparring. For the Jacobs fight, Golovkin was sparring light heavyweights to get ready for the match because he and his trainer Abel Sanchez realized that Jacobs was going to rehydrate a great deal of weight to be as big as possible.

What they didn’t know was that Jacobs was going to skip the International Boxing Federation’s same day weigh-in on the day of the fight in order to have more time to rehydrate. Golovkin had to keep his weight down on the day of the fight to make the IBF’s weigh-in. If there is another a second fight between Golovkin and Jacobs, then team Golovkin will need to decide what they want to do with Jacobs in terms of the weigh-in and perhaps even a rehydration clause to keep the New Yorker from rehydrating into the 180s.

What you want is to have an even playing field for the fight. If Jacobs decides he’s just going to intentionally come over the 160 pound weight limit at the weigh-in the day before the fight so that he can have a better chance at winning, then Golovkin and his management will need to make sure that doesn’t happen by having a weight penalty that would keep Jacobs from gaining an advantage.