De La Hoya gives gameplan to beat GGG

Boxingnews24.com

By Dan Ambrose: Golden Boy Promotions CEO Oscar De La Hoya says IBF/IBO/WBA/WBC middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin is a “live dog” for his title defense against Saul “Canelo” Alvarez on September 16 at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. De La Hoya says he knows how Golovkin can be beaten in this fight.

De La Hoya believes that the best way to beat Golovkin is to pressure him, taking the fight to him, take his best shots and back him up. De La Hoya didn’t say whether he’s give Canelo, 27, his game plan in how to defeat Golovkin or not, but it’s likely he’s passed that a long.

It’s hard to imagine De La Hoya not giving his fighter Canelo a helpful piece of advice, especially given how the game plans put together by the red-haired star’s trainers haven’t always worked out too well. Canelo choosing to box Floyd Mayweather Jr. instead of using pressure was one of the poorer game plans we’ve seen for Canelo in recent years. De La Hoya’s game plan might be equally bad though. Having Canelo go straight at Golovkin instead of using movement would seem like a recipe for failure.

“I’m with my fighter Canelo 100 percent, but it’s not easy,” said De La Hoya in talking about the Golovkin fight. “Triple G is a live dog. Triple G is Triple G. I’ve always said when you put the best in with the best; it elevates them to a whole new level. We haven’t seen the best of Canelo. We haven’t seen the best of Triple G. We will see on September 16,”said De La Hoya.

The way that De La Hoya describes Golovkin, he makes him seem like he’s the underdog in this fight rather than Canelo. In truth, the fighter that is a “live dog” in the Canelo-Golovkin fight is Canelo. He’s the underdog. Until the odds start favoring Canelo, he’s the one that is a “live dog” in the fight. De La Hoya has things upside down in his appraisal of the Canelo vs. GGG fight. Canelo would be the favorite if he had done well in the past in his biggest fights of his career. He lost to Floyd Mayweather Jr., and he struggled against Austin Trout, Miguel Cotto and Erislandy Lara. Those are the only 4 good opponents that Canelo has fought during, and none of them are in the class of Golovkin. Even Mayweather, he wouldn’t have stood a chance against Golovkin in 2013. He would have been worn down and likely stopped. In a jabbing contest, Mayweather would have lost to Golovkin, because his jab is not as good as the Kazakhstan fighter’s. There’s a stark difference in the jabs of Mayweather and Golovkin. So, what we’ve seen in the past is Canelo has not done well against the only 4 good fighters he’s faced. The rest of the guys Canelo has fought have not been talented.

Canelo is going to need to show a tremendous amount of improvement of his game for him not to lose to Golovkin, and I don’t see that improvement happening. He looked the same as he always has in his last fight against Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. last May. I take that back. Canelo didn’t look as good in his last fight compared to how he’s looked in the past. Canelo was slower, without added power, and he still needed rest breaks despite the slow pace of the fight. All the extra muscle weight Canelo put on to face Chavez Jr. at a catch-weight of 164.5 lbs. had made him slower, blockier, and more tank-like, but without improving him. The added size slowed Canelo down considerably. Unfortunately for Canelo, he hasn’t lost that weight. He’s still quite big, and that’s unwelcome news for him going into a fight against a guy like Golovkin, who is at the same weight that he’s always been.

Golovkin isn’t doing anything special for the Canelo fight. He’s just training as he usually does. That’s smart of him. You don’t want to see fighters changing their physique from fight to fight. When a fighter starts bulking up or trimming down, the results is usually negative. Golovkin isn’t going to impede his game by adding more size to fight a smaller middleweight like the 5’8” Canelo, who is a heavier and slightly taller version of Miguel Cotto.

”Fight him at his own game, pressure him,” said De La Hoya in talking about how to beat Golovkin. ”Go forward, take his punches. Hope that those punches don’t hurt and knock you put. You have to use your intelligence, but fire with fire,” said De La Hoya.

Canelo doesn’t have the power or the size to come straight at Golovkin and meet “fire with fire,” as De La Hoya puts it. This isn’t James Kirkland, Alfredo Angulo or Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. that Canelo is fighting. Golovkin is an excellent fighter. He’s not an arguably over-the-hill fighter that has been inactive for ages like Kirkland, Angulo and Chavez Jr. were when they fought Canelo. Maybe De La Hoya realizes that Canelo won’t be able to box Golovkin if he tries to stay on the outside. Canelo is built just like former 2 division world champion Vinny Pazienza, a fighter that used a pressure style of fighting to get the better of his taller opponents. Pazienza, 5’7 ½”, was built like a tank just like Canelo, but he struggled when he would fight guys that had height and boxing skills. Pazienza is just a little bit shorter than the 5’8” Canelo, and both have almost identical arm reach. Pazienza was at his best when he was fighting in the 140-lb. division. When he started bulking up the way Canelo is doing now, he wasn’t nearly as good 154, 160 and 168. Canelo is going to be in the same situation as Pazienza when he goes up against the bigger, taller, and stronger Golovkin.

Canelo is not going to be able to get the better of GGG by using pressure. In fact, it’ll be a disaster for Canelo if he fights Golovkin that way, because he’s going to be jabbed to pieces, and then taken out with body shots just like David Lemieux. Canelo is shorter than the 5’9 ½” Lemieux, and we saw how the Canadian fighter couldn’t reach Golovkin with his punches due to his shorter reach. It didn’t matter that Lemieux was younger and possibly even more powerful than Golovkin. He couldn’t reach him with his punches. He was too short and blocky to get to Golovkin.

De La Hoya obviously has seen Golovkin’s last fight against Danny Jacobs from last March, and he noted how Jacobs had some success when he started to pressure GGG in the last 6 rounds of the fight. Honestly, I don’t think that’s a good game plan for Canelo. Jacobs, 5’11”, could get away with using pressure on Golovkin for a couple of reasons. First off, Jacobs appeared to be heavier than Golovkin. Jacobs looked like he was in the 180s after he rehydrated for the fight. Jacobs skipped the International Boxing Federation’s mandated secondary weight check on the day of the fight so he could use the time to bulk up more. That meant that Jacobs sacrificed him being able to fight for the IBF title just so he could gain an edge over Golovkin. So, while Golovkin had to keep his weight down to make the IBF’s secondary weight check, Jacobs was free to rehydrate. The other thing that kept Jacobs in the fight was Golovkin’s plan of making it a “decision fight.” He said repeatedly going into the fight with Jacobs that he wanted to make it a 12-round fight. I believe that Golovkin changed his mentality for the Jacobs fight so that the match would go 12 rounds. If the idea behind that decision was for Golovkin to lure Golden Boy to let their golden goose Canelo fight Golovkin, then it was a smart decision to let the Jacobs fight go the full 12 rounds. If Golovkin just wanted to prove to himself he could go 12 rounds against Jacobs to test and improve his own stamina, then I think that was not a good thing to do. After all, the Golovkin-Jacobs fight took place in New York, Jacobs’ backyard, and he had the boxing fans on his side in that fight. Golovkin had given Jacobs a huge advantage by agreeing to fight him in New York rather than on the west coast. I’m not sure if Gennady had much choice on the matter though. The fight might not have been made if he didn’t agree to fight Jacobs in New York.

”He has a great trainer. He has the speed,” said De La Hoya about Canelo. ”The speed is amazing. He’s finally a middleweight. He’s finally filled in to a middleweight. So this is exactly why the fight is taking place now, because we were waiting for Canelo to build up to middleweight, and he’s finally done it. His speed and his footwork, it’s amazing. He’s looking fast. He’s looking light on his feet. So that’s exactly what he’s going to need with a lot of aggressive combinations. I think you have to fight fire with fire, and I believe we’re going to see an exciting fight on September 16,” said De La Hoya.

Canelo’s speed is good, but not as good as it was when he was lighter and fighting at 154 and 155. Canelo has put on at least 10 lbs. in my estimation in bulking up for the Chavez Jr. fight, and then keeping the weight on for Golovkin. Canelo has been heavy enough to fight at middleweight for at least 3 years. In 2014, Canelo was already heavy enough to fight at 160. Obviously, Canelo didn’t have the height and reach of the taller middleweights like Jacobs, Golovkin and Lemieux, but he was heavy enough to fight in that weight class.

Canelo’s speed isn’t good enough for him to beat the best. Look at Jacobs. He’s probably faster than Canelo, and he still lost to Golovkin. You must be smart, and you need power and stamina. Canelo is smart, but he’s not powerful and he’s short for the middleweight division. The biggest problem Canelo has is his stamina issues. He needs to rest as frequently as possible when he’s forced to fight hard. We didn’t see Canelo take a lot of rest breaks against Chavez Jr. because the fight was fought at a slow pace for 12 rounds.

Chavez Jr. was too weight drained to take the fight to Canelo. Had Chavez Jr. been well conditioned, he could have forced Canelo to fight hard the way that Liam Smith did in the first 4 rounds of his fight against Canelo last September. Canelo looked tired in that fight, and he needed to take a lot of rest breaks against the ropes. The rest breaks weren’t by design. They were clearly used by Canelo because he was exhausted by the pressure that Smith was putting on him.

Smith landed a lot of hard shots to the head and body of Canelo. If Smith hadn’t gotten tired, he might have beaten Canelo. The knockout in the 9th round was more a product of Smith being exhausted than from anything Canelo was doing. Canelo had his back against the ropes, and was looking tired himself. Just imagine what’ll happen to Canelo when it’s Golovkin inside the ring, hammering him for 3 minutes of every round without backing off, and without exhausting himself the way that Smith did. Smith did a lot of talking before the fight how he was going to pressure Canelo for 12 rounds and force him to fight 3 full minutes of each round. I had doubts that Smith would be able to do this, because he’d always been a fighter that fought in brief spurts just like Canelo. Smith tried to change his normal slow-paced style of fighting for the Canelo fight, but it didn’t work for him. You must have an excellent cardiovascular system to fight a fast-paced fight, and Smith was lacking in that department. Canelo’s limited stamina is pretty much the same as Smith’s. That means that if Golovkin pushes the fight hard against Canelo for 6 rounds, we’re going to see him wear down the Golden Boy star and knock him out by the 6th round. I can’t see the fight going past round 6. Canelo has put too much weight on, and that’s going to hurt his already poor stamina.