By Marcus Richardson: Now that James Kirkland has pulled out of the September 15th pay per view fight against WBC junior middleweight champion Saul Alvarez because of a shoulder injury, Golden Boy Promotions and Alvarez have few options now for quality fighter if they’re looking for a beatable opponent. The mistake here was making this a PPV bout before Alvarez had a big enough fan base for him to attract a lot of fans in the United States.
The original opponent Paul Williams was a popular enough fighter to make an Alvarez vs. Williams fight a marginally decent PPV bout if you’re boxing fanatic. But the Kirkland-Alvarez fight was hardly worth paying more than a couple of bucks in my view. And now they don’t even have Kirkland.
If Golden Boy is committed to making Alvarez’s September 15th fight a PPV bout, then I think they’re going to need to make a big decision. Either they pay the money and risk their prize Alvarez against a quality opponent like Erislandy Lara, or they choose another fodder type fighter to let Alvarez steamroll over and bring in less than spectacular PPV numbers.
Here are the options available for Alvarez:
Erislandy Lara
Vanes Martirosyan
Damian Jonak
Carlos Molina
Yudel Jhonson
Ryan Rhodes
Gabriel Rosada
Demetrius Andrade
Emanuele Della Rosa
Jonathan Gonzalez
Azael Cossio
David Zegarra
I’ve never heard of some of these guys and no doubt the interest would be quite low if Golden Boy selected one of them for Alvarez. If Golden Boy doesn’t want Alvarez to be put in a risky fight, then they’ll likely opt for him to stay away from Martirosyan and Lara. Instead, they’ll probably settle for Molina, because he’s proven and doesn’t have much power to worry Alvarez. Molina will likely make Alvarez look bad by smothering him on the inside and shutting down his offense. It would be a good fight for Alvarez to show what he can do against a good inside fighter, but I don’t think it’ll get many buys on PPV because Molina isn’t a star.