People just can’t get enough cinnamon these days.
Quick Jabs
We were waiting to talk about the Canelo Alvarez ratings for his fight with James Kirkland until we got more solid info on how much the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao replay helped boost it, but there is no solid info on that. What we do know suggests that Alvarez is a ratings giant. He averaged 2.1 million viewers against Kirkland, the most since HBO’s replay of the Bernard Hopkins-Antonio Tarver pay-per-view headliner in 2006. We can still guess that Mayweather-Pacquiao helped as a lead-in, approximating based on the figures that were available, that it did about 1.3 million on replay on HBO (and another 350K on Showtime, which is a decent total replay figure for a fight everyone dissed). We can also guess that Mayweather-Pacquiao might have helped in the other direction: Canelo-Kirkland was a junior middleweight showdown marketed as a contrast sure to deliver action, unlike Mayweather-Pacquiao. Ultimately, this all still points to Canelo as a huge, huge star indefinitely, whatever benefits helped him get there….
Gennady Golovkin, meanwhile, keeps chugging along at the ratings at a solid pace. His middleweight bout against little-known and unheralded Willie Monroe, Jr., in a fight nobody really expected to be competitive, did 1.3 million viewers on average, which is better than his recent fights — best since Curtis Stevens in 2013, so far as I can tell. He’s had some good numbers and some so-so numbers at times on HBO. But because HBO has decided they’re just going to pay him to be on the air no matter who he fights, it makes him a lure for decent money bouts. His numbers are also good enough to offer some synergy should he ever face Canelo, which, again, I don’t doubt Canelo would do but that I remain doubtful Golden Boy would ever want. (On the Golovkin-Monroe undercard, flyweight Roman Gonzalez averaged 961K, not bad for a debut for a small fighter even if he was piggybacking on Golovkin some)…
The good news is that Carl Froch is warming up to a Golovkin fight, to the point that some talks have begun. This could not be more awesome. Froch is the kind of hard-nosed, hard-hitting super middleweight with a pound-for-pound resume who could test Golovkin, something most of us want to see happen for him. What’s more, it would be a surefire action brawl. Gimme gimme gimme gimme…
The Golden Boy lawsuit against mega-manager Al Haymon is fascinating, especially coming after the complaint to the U.S. attorney general by the Association of Boxing Commissioners, and especially when you look who joined the suit. If you’re a boxing writer, what you’re really hoping is that information comes out of the suit. There might or might not be validity to the complaint; plenty of people have thought about going after Haymon (and his partners) legally over a monopoly and/or violating the distinction between boxing manager and boxing promoter, and Main Events went after Haymon legally last year too before dropping their suit. The difference is, Haymon in 2015 is more powerful than ever, and perhaps this means there’s more grounds for the suit. Or maybe it’s sour grapes in some cases from some of the parties involved — back when Golden Boy’s Oscar De La Hoya was allied with Haymon, he spoke rather openly of trying to do what he now alleges Haymon is trying to do, and it’s maybe no coincidence that the WBO is going after Haymon via the ABC complaint while his television series is ignoring the belt-sanctioning gang…
Mostly, it’s a good idea to increase penalties for boxers that fail drug tests. The Nevada State Athletic Commission has upped them considerably, and almost all of that is welcome news. I’m personally not sure, however, about turning a no contest to a loss, and about upping penalties for marijuana use. It seems to me that “NC” did the trick — in all other instances of cheating in sports I can think of, results are invalidated rather than rendered as losses — and c’mon, marijuana doesn’t make anybody better at boxing…
It doesn’t look good that Mayweather sought a clause in the drug testing contract with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency for a retroactive therapeutic use exemption in the case of a positive test, and it sounds like in this case Thomas Hauser saw actual contract language, so let’s assume it’s accurate. Would it be so hard to have either A. sought out comment from Mayweather’s camp about why or B. if Hauser did already, just say so?
(HOUSTON — Alvarez, left, delivers a punch to Kirkland at Minute Maid Park on May 9; photo via Scott Halleran/Getty Images)
