Gennady ‘GGG’ Golovkin, Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez Rematch Booked for September 15

The deal is DONE!! #CaneloGGG2 Sept 15 pic.twitter.com/FInXoUxyUk

— Golden Boy Boxing (@GoldenBoyBoxing) June 13, 2018

Golden Boy Boxing announced in a tweet Wednesday that they had struck a deal with Gennady “GGG” Golovkin for a rematch with Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, scheduled to take place on Sept. 15. This came as a welcome surprise, as for months following Alvarez’s positive test for clenbuterol, the two camps seemed distant in their negotiations, culminating in a deadline of 3 p.m. Wednesday being made by Golden Boy (and not met by Golovkin’s team) and Oscar De La Hoya declaring the fight dead on Wednesday afternoon. How serious this deadline was we may never know, as the fight was announced only two hours later.

While some of the writing on the matchup has been way too hyperbolic (USA Today’s “the big lead” declared the fight will either "save or destroy boxing for years to come," a tired boxing trope that has been said about pretty much every big fight of the past 15 years and will likely be repeated should the Anthony Joshua-Deontay Wilder fight come to fruition, which seems very likely), this is in fact a great thing for boxing. The alternative opponents being floated for Alvarez (such as Daniel Jacobs or Spike O'Sullivan) would never capture the imagination of the public the way a rematch with “GGG” will, and with Mexico having two big fight weekends a year, should these negotiations have fallen through a Canelo-GGG rematch would have likely been pushed to May 5, a full 20 months after their first matchup ended in a draw.

Although most people think Golovkin should have been given the decision in their first matchup, the fact that slick boxers tend to win rematches over power punchers and that Golovkin gets further from his prime with every passing day, make this fight very intriguing. Either way, we’ll get to see what happens on Sept. 15, and for that we should all be grateful.