By Keith Idec

Canelo Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin won’t partake in a traditional tour to promote their upcoming middleweight championship rematch.

All the controversy that has unfolded during the past three months has provided an enormous amount of free marketing and seemingly makes multi-city publicity stops to promote their HBO Pay-Per-View fight unnecessary. Oscar De La Hoya, Alvarez’s promoter, told Yahoo! Sports in a video interview Monday that Alvarez is done doing interviews for now, even though he hasn’t been made available since the deal was made Wednesday for Golovkin and Alvarez to fight again September 15 in Las Vegas.

Golovkin (38-0-1, 34 KOs) insists he knows why Alvarez (49-1-2, 34 KOs) won’t face him at one or more press conferences before they arrive in Las Vegas the week of their fight.

“I think he simply cannot look into my eyes and that’s all,” Golovkin said during a press conference Monday in Los Angeles. “Because he knows that I am correct with everything.”

By “everything,” Golovkin means his harsh criticism of Alvarez’s two failed performance-enhancing drug tests in February. Alvarez claims contaminated meat consumed in his native Mexico triggered positive tests for clenbuterol, a banned substance.

Golovkin contends Alvarez cheated on purpose and is “a dirty fighter.” The defending WBA/WBC/IBO middleweight champion also is angry because Alvarez’s subsequent six-month suspension by the Nevada State Athletic Commission caused the cancelation of their lucrative rematch May 5 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.

Now that their rematch has been rescheduled, Golovkin and his handlers won’t worry about Alvarez’s participation, or lack thereof, in promoting boxing’s biggest event of 2018. They think they’ll surpass the roughly 1.3 million buys their first fight produced September 16 regardless of whether Alvarez makes himself available.

“Just like we can’t control where he’s gonna train or how he’s gonna fight in the ring, however they promote the fight on their side is up to them,” said Tom Loeffler, Golovkin’s promoter. “You see Gennady here, sitting in front of everyone, very accessible to the media. I’ve talked to [trainer] Abel [Sanchez] already and we’re gonna have open days in the training camp for the media. He’s gonna come down here [to Los Angeles]. He’s gonna do other interviews, other appearances on television. So Gennady’s gonna go through this promotion and this training camp just like it’s another fight. Of course it’s a rematch with Canelo Alvarez, but he can’t focus, or we can’t focus as a team on what Canelo’s gonna do or what Golden Boy is gonna do. We’ll try to make the best out of the promotion that we can. Triple-G is always, because he’s the champion, he takes on the responsibility of taking the lead in the promotions, regardless of how the promotional structure is. That’s his responsibility as champion and frankly, that’s one of the reasons why his star has risen so quickly.

“Pretty much not being known here in America when he made his HBO debut in September 2012 – now it’ll be exactly six years from his HBO debut, it’ll September 15th, 2018, and he is one of the biggest stars in the sport of boxing, here not only in the United States, but internationally. And that’s the responsibility that he takes. And we’ll do our part. You know, if Canelo locks himself into training camp and is focused on the fight, that’s up to him if he wants to do it that way. But you see Gennady is not hiding from anyone. A lot of times he’s out of the country, and that’s why we can’t get access to him. But now that he’s gonna be here, training up in Big Bear, we’re gonna do our job to promote this fight.”

Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.