Canelo-Golovkin Android Press Conference Was A Bust

The rematch between unified middleweight world champion Gennady Golovkin and Canelo Alvarez is expected to be the biggest fight of the year, but yet another promotional blunder could impede the fight from achieving higher pay-per-view numbers.

On Tuesday, Golden Boy Promotions streamed a news conference on Facebook to start official promotion of the rematch. The two combatants did not meet face-to-face, but communicated via a split-screen satellite.

The point of these conferences is to kick off ticket sales and get fans excited about the fight, but this was not just any missed opportunity, Oscar De La Hoya completely missed the mark on this one. It was not even close.

Prior to their first bout, which ended in a highly controversial split draw on Sept. 16, both Alvarez and Golovkin closed their training camps to the media approximately seven weeks before the fight, which generated 1.3 million pay-per-view sales. That is not a bad number, but it could have been so much better, especially when you consider that the clash was hyped as a Hagler-Hearns type matchup. It was nothing remotely close to that fight, but it was still a thoroughly entertaining scrap.

De La Hoya spent far too much time criticizing the Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor fight last year instead of promoting his own event, but he had another pristine opportunity in his fingertips to guarantee the Canelo-GGG rematch as a far more brutal fight.

What could be better than two men desperately wanting to knock the living daylights out of each other out meeting face-to-face months before they can actually lay hands on one another?

Lennox Lewis vs. Hasim Rahman, Lennox Lewis vs. Mike Tyson, Erik Morales vs. Marco Antonio Barrera are a few examples.

The fans want to see pre-fight drama. They do not want to see two androids on a split screen.

De La Hoya will have to do better.