According to Fan Rafael of espn.com, Gennady Golovkin accepted terms for a September 15th rematch with Canelo Alvarez a couple hours after the Golden Boy Promotions deadline of noon Pacific Time.
“I’m happy to inform that we have a fight September 15!!!!,” Golden Boy Promotions’ Oscar De La Hoya tweeted.
“It was a dead deal at noon. We were going to proceed with a Billy Joe Saunders fight. We had a deal in place to fight Billy Joe Saunders at the end of August,” Golovkin promoter Tom Loeffler told ESPN of a match with world titleholder Saunders. “We definitely had an agreement in place with Billy Joe Saunders. I was up front with them and told them if there’s a way to get the Canelo deal that was a priority, but Gennady had no hesitation fighting Billy Joe Saunders because he felt it was a challenging fight to fight an undefeated champion.”
“Still working on it,” Loeffler texted to ESPN 20 minutes after the deadline as he scrambled to see if Golovkin, who is in Moscow as a guest of one of his sponsors for the World Cup, was interested in the newest proposal.
Golden Boy President Eric Gomez said he was trying to reach De La Hoya during his interview with ESPN and he was frustrated because he wasn’t answering his phone. But ultimately, Gomez said, “We threw a Hail Mary and it was caught. The fight’s done.”
“Gennady stuck to his guns,” Loeffler said. “He always wanted the Canelo rematch, but at the same time, he wanted the respect as the champion, especially with what happened with the May 5 cancellation. We figured out a way to get it done. After the fight was dead, we figured out a way to resuscitate it. They were moving on and we were moving on. I can’t go into the details, but Gennady is satisfied with the deal. Both fighters were stuck and we needed one of our partners to get involved and the MGM did. That’s how the deal was saved. We came up with the solution.
“Gennady is happy he is getting the respect, and I’m happy we’re able to participate in the biggest fight in the sport of boxing. This goes to Gennady’s legacy. It’s a huge fight for both guys. I think it’s going to be a much bigger promotion than first time out.”
When it appeared that the fight was dead on Wednesday afternoon, De La Hoya told ESPN, “We want the fight, Tom Loeffler wants the fight. Clearly, the only person here who doesn’t want the fight is GGG. The fans want the fight. We bent over backwards. GGG says he’s a fighter, not a businessman, and he’s right. He’s no businessman because he doesn’t understand numbers. It’s 100 percent over. We’ve been trying to make the numbers work and Canelo finally said, ‘Screw this guy.’ We’ve come off our 35 percent. We’ve come off our contract that we had signed a couple of months ago and we still moved our percentage to make Golovkin happy, but clearly he doesn’t want the fight.
“Tom and Eric have been on the phone until right now and Eric just told me we have no deal — 100 percent there is no fight. We’ve come up on our offer and there’s no budge from him, so there’s no fight. That’s it. There’s no fight. We’re moving on. We have deadlines.”
