By Keith Idec
LAS VEGAS – To be clear, Abel Sanchez is much more concerned with Gennady Golovkin’s future opponents.
Golovkin’s trainer hopes a much-discussed Golokvin-Danny Jacobs middleweight championship clash takes place sometime in March and leads Golovkin to a pay-per-view showdown with Canelo Alvarez in September.
But during a wide-ranging interview with a small group of reporters after Friday’s weigh-in at The Cosmopolitan, Sanchez made it clear that a Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Manny Pacquiao rematch is not on his 2017 wish list.
“First of all, I don’t wanna see that fight again,” Sanchez said. “I think that if Floyd comes back, I don’t think he should fight Manny. I think that ship has sailed. If Floyd comes back, it probably won’t be in May, it’ll probably be in September, to steal that date, like he always does. And by then there will be a couple guys in the running. Maybe the winner of [Keith] Thurman and [Danny] Garcia could be a candidate for it, if one guy looks great.”
Thurman (27-0, 22 KOs), of Clearwater, Florida, and Philadelphia’s Garcia (33-0, 19 KOs) are scheduled to fight March 4 at an undetermined venue for Thurman’s WBA world welterweight title and Garcia’s WBC world 147-pound championship.
Mayweather’s win over Pacquiao generated more than $600 million in overall revenue. That May 2015 showdown also drew roughly 4.6 million pay-per-views, by far boxing’s biggest pay-per-view success.
The mundane nature of the heavily hyped fight left many like Sanchez dissatisfied and adamant about not paying to watch a pay-per-view rematch.
“I sure as hell won’t buy a [Mayweather-]Manny Pacquiao fight again,” Sanchez said. “It happened five years too late and it was a dud when it did happen.”
Sanchez was in Las Vegas because the welterweight he trains, Russia’s Konstantin Ponomarev (31-0, 13 KOs), was scheduled to meet Mexico’s Silverio Ortiz (35-18, 17 KOs) on the non-televised portion of the Vasyl Lomachenko-Nicholas Walters card at The Chelsea inside The Cosmopolitan.
Ponomarev won a lopsided eight round unanimous decision over Ortiz.
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.
