With Floyd Mayweather uninterested in fighting anyone butConor McGregor, boxing fans are on the lookout for a new #1 pound for pound fighter in their sport. And if it were a popularity contest, there’s no doubt thatGennady ‘GGG’ Golovkin would win. But Golovkin’s record lacks the kind of marquee names required to cement a claim on the top position … mainly because the other fighters near his weightclass want nothing to do withthe Kazakh knockout artist.
But that may be changing as Golovkin’s drawing power is finally hitting a tipping point where the lure of money may be good enough to convince big name fighters to step into the ring with him. At the top of that list isSaul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez, whose promoter Oscar De La Hoya has danced around a fight with Gennady for over a year now.
But if GGG’s promoter Tom Loeffler isn’t blowing smoke, a fight between Golovkin and Canelo may finally be right around the corner. In a press conference leading up to Golovkin’s fight with Daniel Jacobs on Saturday March 18th, Loeffler sounded positive.
“I don’t see any reason why we can’t sign a deal for a fight with Canelo for September,” he said. “If I felt like there was a point we couldn’t overcome, then I would say okay, it doesn’t look very good. But so far in all the discussions with [Golden Boy Productions president] Eric Gomez I’ve had, there hasn’t been any. I’m mean sure, they have a position, we have a position. But so far we’ve been able to find middle ground on a lot of the points. And to further that, we’ve made a lot of concessions. We’re not asking for a lot of different points, we’ve made a lot of concessions just to get the fight.”
“It doesn’t make sense to go into the details and negotiate through the media,” he concluded. “But I feel comfortable that there’s no one issue outstanding that’s going to stop this fight from happening.”
A fight with Canelo Alvarez would be one of if not the biggest boxing match of the year … barring the specter of Floyd Mayweather versus Conor McGregor, which may end up spoiling another aspect of Loeffler’s Golovkin / Alvarez aspirations: rumor has it the boxing versus MMA superfight is being targeted for September, right around when Golovkin wants a Canelo match to happen.
