By Daily Sports on August 10, 2017

If things had gone the way that promoter Oscar De La Hoya had hoped a few months ago, Canelo Alvarez would be preparing to rake in a massive payday to box UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor; Floyd Mayweather would still be retired; and Gennady Golovkin would still be searching for that ever-elusive career-defining match.

Instead, Mayweather is returning to boxing after a nearly two-year retirement. He was lured back to the game by the prospect of what he sees as easy money to fight McGregor, the audacious mixed martial arts superstar who cooked up the notion that he just might be able to beat one of the greatest boxers ever despite never having had a boxing match before.

Golovkin finally has that bout he sought, the match in which he can gain affirmation for his talents after a career spent pulverizing the overmatched likes of Willie Monroe and Dominic Wade and pleading for the greats to fight him.

Alvarez is set to meet Golovkin in a middleweight unification bout on Sept. 16 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas that De La Hoya, ever the promoter, insists is the greatest middleweight bout of all-time.

Asked where the fight ranks in the pantheon of great middleweight bouts of the last 20 years – and it’s hard to come up with many in 20 years, as most of the great middleweight scraps were long before that – De La Hoya didn’t simply stop with the last two decades.

“By far this is in the biggest, probably in the history of the middleweight division,” said De La Hoya, who needs every edge he can get in selling what on paper is a fantastic bout between two of the best fighters in the world but which is being tragically overlooked given that Mayweather and McGregor will fight on Aug. 26 at T-Mobile Arena in a bout that is expected to smash all existing financial records.

“I mean, obviously, we have to wait for the actual fight to see what unfolds and takes place, but in terms of magnitude, in terms of [public relations], in terms of attention that it’s receiving, in terms of people that will be watching, yeah, this has to be the biggest. And obviously, we will have to wait until Sept. 16 to see if it’s going to be the best, which I think it will be, in the history of the middleweight division. But it has all the ingredients to unfold to be one of the best fights in the last 30 years. … The indications tell us that this will be a huge blockbuster.” (Yahoosports)

•Photo shows Canelo Alvarez.

Source Daily Sports

Posted August 10, 2017

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