Jermall Charlo has mapped out his two-fight plan to get him a fight against Canelo Alvarez for his retirement clash. Charlo (33-0, 22 KOs) wants to defeat Thomas LaManna (39-5-1, 18 KOs) on May 31st, and then Caleb Plant. He feels those two wins will open the door for a fight against Canelo for his undisputed super middleweight championship.
(Credit: Michael Ham/Premier Boxing Champions)
He doesn’t say who he would be targeting if Canelo still isn’t blessing him with the retirement fight, but he may need to be one of the top-rated contenders like Diego Pacheco or Christian Mbilli.
Charlo’s Two-Fight Plan
Charlo, 34, is coming off a two-year layoff to fight veteran LaManna, 33, in a 10-round fight on PBC on Prime Video at the Michelob Ultra Arena in Las Vegas. They’ll be fighting on the Caleb Plant vs. Jose Armando Resendiz undercard.
Plant, 32, didn’t say anything today when Jermall said at the podium at their Los Angeles press conference that he wants to fight him next. When interviewed after, Plant said he’s hoping to get the winner of the Canelo vs. Terence Crawford fight straightaway, which means he’s not thinking about fighting Charlo.
Of course, there’s little chance that Canelo will fight Plant because there’s no demand for the fight, and he hasn’t been beating good enough opposition to create interest. When you fight stiffs, as Plant has been doing, it amounts to nothing. He’s been too slow to figure that out. He thought he could take a backdoor path to a rematch with Canelo by beating 39-year-old Anthony Dirrell, Trevor McCumby, and now Jose Armando Resendiz.
“There’s more pressure on me because I’ve been inactive. There’s pressure on Plant, too, because he’s been inactive,” said Jermall Charlo to the media today about his May 31st return to the ring after two years of inactivity. “It’s a little more hospitality when it comes to Jermall Charlo.
“When it comes to Jermall Charlo, I’m a lot more emotional about what I do. I put my undefeated record on the line over inactivity. I got to be a winner, and that’s what I do. I come to win. I need to go back to my roots. I need to go back to what I do.”
Charlo isn’t risking much taking on LaManna rather than a notable young contender at super middleweight. This fight is a waste of time for Jermall because he already had a tune-up two years ago, and here he is doing it again.
Back to Basics
“We’re back in the gym grinding it out like we used to be. When you hear that clapping, ‘Yeah, you did good.’ You hear that from people who really love you,” said Jermall. “The people that really mean it, and thiat’s something I needed. I’m not worried about the zero. I’m a perfectionist. I’m worried about getting the job done.
“I’m not worried about being undefeated. I’m undefeated by default. I loved it. Canelo, he slid by,” said Jermall when asked if he watched Canelo Alvarez’s fight last Saturday night against William Scull.
“I just looked at myself and thought, ‘This isn’t what I want to be. This isn’t what I thought it was going to be,'” said Jermall about how he pulled himself out of the bad place that he’d taken his life during the last two years. “‘Let’s get up and let’s get active.’ I don’t look at social media.”
