Former WBA junior middleweight champion Austin “No Doubt” Trout (30-3, 17 KOs) wonders if Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (48-1-1, 34 KOs) is ever going to fight IBF/IBO/WBA/WBC middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (36-0, 33 KOs) or not. Trout, 31, notes that Canelo is saying that he’ll fight Golovkin in September of next year rather than right now.
Trout sees that as a sign that Canelo could be looking to wait until Golovkin is over-the-hill before he finally agrees to fight him.
Trout saw Golovkin’s recent fight against welterweight Kell Brook on September 10, and he thinks that Brook was winning the fight at the time that the contest was stopped in the 5th round due to him taking heavy punishment. However, Trout blames the defeat on Brook suffering an eye injury and not because Golovkin was starting to wear him down with heavy shots to the head and body in the 4th and 5th rounds.
Trout said to Fighthype.com:
“Brook was beating Golovkin until he got stretched. He didn’t get stretched. He got his eye broken. That would be a really good fight [Canelo vs. Golovkin], those two. If that fight happens, it would be one hell of a fight. I don’t know if Canelo is going to really try and fight him, because he said, ‘I’ll fight you September next year. How long is Triple G going to be able to make 160? He’s already in his mid-30s. Is he waiting for him to get over the hill?”
It would be a real disappointment if Canelo chooses to steer around Golovkin rather than facing him in 2017. It does look bad that Canelo isn’t fighting Golovkin now. There’s no reason to make him wait any longer. If the fight gets pushed past 2017, then you would have to conclude that Canelo isn’t interested in facing Golovkin until he’s older.
If Canelo wanted the fight with Golovkin, he could order his promoters at Golden Boy to make the fight happen. Canelo is said to be the one who insisted on fighting Trout and Erislandy Lara in the past. You have to ask the question of why Canelo isn’t doing the same thing with Golovkin.
Canelo could push for the fight against Triple G, and Golden Boy would give him his way. There’s nothing much going to change for the Canelo-Golovkin fight by waiting until 2017 or later to make the fight other than Golovkin aging. I don’t think the Canelo vs. Golovkin fight is going to get bigger and create more news when it does eventually take place.
With Canelo’s popularity declining due to weak match-making, you can argue that the Canelo-Golovkin fight will be smaller in the future rather than bigger. Golovkin might continue to get popularity, but Canelo appears to be staring o go into a gradual decline in terms of his PPV numbers. Canelo’s pay-per-views have dropped from 900,000 for the Miguel Cotto fight last year to 450,000 for the Amir Khan fight to as low as 250,000 for his match against Liam Smith in their fight on September 17.
Golovkin is a normal size middleweight. He’s not someone that is barely making the 160lb weight class. He’s clearly not going to get any bigger than he is now. If Golovkin moves out of the 160lb division, he’ll do it because he wants to, not because he’s forced to.
It’s hard to agree with Trout that Brook was winning the fight against Golovkin.
It looked like Brook won the 2nd round, and lost round 1, 3 and 4 at the time of the stoppage in the 5th. If Trout believes that Brook was ahead at the time of the stoppage, then that means he gave round one to Brook. That’s the round in which Brook was badly hurt by a left hook from Golovkin and staggered. To give Brook the 1st round makes no sense unless fighters win rounds by getting hurt.
