Linares vs. Lomachenko on May 12th clashes with Canelo-Golovkin 2 replay

By Chris Williams: For the Vasyl Lomachenko vs. Jorge Linares lightweight battle to take place, they’re going to need to pick another date for the fight instead of the May 12th date that Top Rank wants. The date reportedly clashes with the HBO reply of Saul Canelo Alvarez vs. Gennady ‘GGG’ Golovkin on the 12th of May, according to @SteveUCNLive.

Golden Boy Promotion co-promotes Linares, so they have some control over when he fights. If Golden Boy says not to Linares fighting Lomachenko on May 5 or 12, then Top Rank can always match him against their fighter Ray Beltran on one of those two dates. Beltran is fighting this Saturday against Paulus Moses for the vacant WBO lightweight title.

Top Rank wants Lomachenko to win a lightweight title. So if they can’t get Linares for Lomachenko to fight, then we’ll probably be seeing them match the Ukrainian star against Beltran on the May 5th or 12th. It’s bad news for Golden Boy to have Lomachenko fighting on either of those 2 dates due to the Canelo-Golovkin fight.

Canelo-Golovkin will be taking place on May 5th on HBO pay-per-view, and like most big pay-per-view fights on that network, a replay will be televised on regular HBO 1 week later, which is May 12th. If Lomachenko and Linares fight each other on May 12th, it’ll be on Showtime and/or ESPN, not HBO. That means the Lomachenko-Linares fight on May 12th will conflict with the Canelo vs. Golovkin replay on HBO. Golden Boy Promotions would be making a huge mistake if they agreed to let Linares fight Lomachenko on that date, because it would pull the fans away from HBO for the Canelo-GGG replay.

It’s obviously not going to work for Top Rank to stage the Lomachenko vs. Linares fight on that date.

Golden Boy Promotions is said to be unwilling to let their fighter Linares fight Lomachenko on May 12. So unless Top Rank is willing to stage the Linares-Lomachenko fight on a different date, the fight isn’t going to happen. It’s unclear who with Top Rank came up with the idea to have Lomachenko fight Linares on May 12th. Someone had to have been asleep at the wheel not to realize that they would impact the Linares vs. Lomachenko fight.

Bob Arum of Top Rank is said to want the Linares vs. Lomachenlo on May 5 or May 12 on ESPN. If Lomachenko-Linares fight takes place on May 5th, it would be the same night as the Canelo vs. Golovkin 2 fight. It’s unclear why Arum would want to stage the fight on the night, because it would mean far fewer boxing fans would see the Lomachenko-Linares fight.

That’s a crazy idea. We’ll see if Arum wants to push hard to make the Lomachenko vs. Linares fight for the 12th of May. Like I said, if Linares don’t take the fight with Lomachenko on May 12th, Arum can always make it an in house Top Rank fight by having Lomachenko-Beltran take place on that date on ESPN. It’s not a great fight though. There will be far fewer boxing fans getting excited about seeing Lomachenko fight Beltran than Linares.