Canelo Alvarez's track record of fighting the best continues
When I wrote my annual boxing wishes column for the new year two weeks ago one of the top items on my list read like this: "(For) Canelo Alvarez to line up Daniel Jacobs for his May fight and then a third fight with Gennady Golovkin for his September bout."
Well, it didn't take long for the first half of that come true with the news on Thursday that middleweight world champion Alvarez will meet Jacobs to unify their 160-pound world titles -- Alvarez's two with Jacobs' one -- on May 4 at a site to be determined (likely T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas), in the second fight of Alvarez's mega deal with streaming service DAZN.
When DAZN lavished an athlete-record deal on Alvarez -- 11 fights over five years worth at least $365 million -- the company hierarchy had to make an assessment of whether the fights Alvarez would take would justify the massive investment.
Alvarez has made nine figures fighting on pay-per-view, where the more he sold the more he made. But with $365 million coming to him no matter who he faced, he easily could have just taken soft fights and pocketed easy money.
DAZN rolled the dice and Canelo is delivering because it is not in his DNA to seek a string of easy fights. He has a long history of wanting to challenge himself and wanting to fight the best.
He has said time and again that he wants to be a legend, wants to leave a lasting legacy and that he wants to please boxing fans by fighting the biggest and best possible fights.
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Nobody expects him to do that every single time out so when he opted for an easy fight at super middleweight for a secondary title against Rocky Fielding in December -- coming off a grueling rematch with Gennady Golovkin three months earlier -- to kick off his DAZN deal, I had no problem with it even if others were highly critical. I truly believed Alvarez would look for an A-level fight next time out and not waste his time with a David Lemieux sort of fight.
"If Canelo was any other fighter he would not have chosen Jacobs to fight," Golden Boy Promotions CEO Oscar De La Hoya, told ESPN shortly after the Jacobs deal was finalized. "We can pick anyone we want to fight but Canelo is fighting for legacy. He understands that if you fight for legacy the money will come. You fight for legacy first and then the money will come, but this is what every partner gets when they sign with Canelo and Golden Boy. We want to give the fight fans the best fights and that's the bottom line."
Just look at Alvarez's career path so far and it's no surprise he picked Jacobs because Alvarez has never ducked a tough fight and is not about to start.
In 2013, he took on Austin Trout in a junior middleweight unification fight that Golden Boy was not very enthusiastic about, but Alvarez wanted it. He insisted. He got it. And he scored a competitive decision win over a prime Trout in a good fight.
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