De La Hoya Debunks Saunders
For the past couple of weeks, there has been persistent conjecture indicating that WBO world super middleweight champion “Superb” Billy Joe Saunders (29-0, 14 KO’s) was a front-runner to face WBA regular world super middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (53-1-2, 36 KO’s).
NOT SO FAST SAUNDERS
The Mexican boxing cash cow still has yet to identify an opponent for his upcoming Cinco de Mayo outing. Also, numerous folks throughout the industry have taken to believing that Superb was at the top of a short list of potential foes.
Well that was until, in an exclusive interview with SecondsOut, Golden Boy Promotions president Oscar De La Hoya eradicated this notion.
“You know there are so many options and I would even hate to throw a name out there because once you throw names out there, then they think that they’re like ‘the’ guy and the numbers go up drastically, but he does have many options.
I’ll tell you one thing, Saunders is not the front-runner, that’s for sure! I have no idea who threw that name out there, but once we nail down who it’s going to be we’ll have an announcement shortly.”
WHO’S THE MAN?!
With this meaty bit of information, we now know that Oscar has snubbed Jermall Charlo completely as an option and cast great doubt on Saunders. Seeing as how Canelo has openly said he is not interested in WBO world middleweight champion Demetrius “Boo-Boo” Andrade, (28-0, 17 KO’s) the only other meaningful bout at 160 is with IBF and IBO world middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (40-1-1, 35 KO’s).
Yet, given the amount of baseless speculation and past disinterest in a number of his current options, rather than continue with the guessing game, it’d probably be best to just sit and wait to see what Team Alvarez announces to the public.
By: Bakari Simpson
