Canelo Alvarez and Gennadiy Golovkin will have the newly created WBC “Zapoteca Belt” [Jaguar Warrior Belt] on the line for the winner of their September 17th trilogy fight at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
The fight is big enough not to need a made-up belt by the World Boxing Council to add to it. The former four-division world champion Canelo is coming off a loss to Dmitry Bivol, and Golovkin is in the position to try and upset the odds.
There’s no word yet whether there will be an extra sanctioning fee attached to the new belt. If so, it’ll be interesting to see if the Canelo-Golovkin III winner chooses to accept the new “Zapoteca Belt” or decline it, which would make a lot of sense, given that there are already four real titles on the line for the September 17th trilogy.
It’s bad enough that the Canelo-Golovkin winner will have sanctioning fees to deal with for the four belts at 168. Adding a fifth title is too much.
The new “Jaguar belt” was created by artisans from the Zapotec culture in Oaxaca. That’s nice, but it seems a bit much at this point.
Golovkin will be looking to duplicate the success that Bivol 21-0, 11 KOs) had in beating Canelo in a one-sided manner last May.
Canelo has hinted that he wasn’t 100% for the Bivol fight, but it’s pretty clear from watching the contest that he would have gotten his head boxed off even if he were fighting on all eight cylinders.
Bivol was superior to Canelo in every facet of the game and made him look one-dimensional in the process. What added to Canelo’s loss was his horrendously poor cardio. The Mexican star looked gassed out after three rounds, and he had lacked the stamina to throw more than a small handful of punches without needing rest breaks.
If Golovkin and his trainer Johnathon Banks have studied what Bivol did to defeat Canelo, they’ll be sure to push a fast pace and throw a lot of combinations because those are the things that gave Alvarez fits.
We don’t know if Golovkin (42-1-1, 37 KOs) will choose to stay at super middleweight should he defeat the favorite Canelo ((57-2-2, 39 KOs).
The 40-year-old Golovkin is moving up in weight from 160 to 168 to challenge Canelo on September 17th on DAZN pay-per-view at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
