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By Dan Ambrose: In disappointing news for fans of former WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (44-1-1, 31 KOs), his pay-per-view fight last month on July 12th Showtime against WBA junior middleweight champion Erislandy Lara (19-2-2, 12 KOs) brought in around 300,000 buys, according to Dan Rafael of ESPN.

The numbers are unofficial, however, because Showtime and Golden Boy Promotions have yet to release the final PPV numbers. At this point you have to wonder whether they ever win. If these numbers stay at 300K, then Canelo’s fight with Lara did worse than the 350K PPV buys Canelo did for his fight against Alfredo Angulo earlier this year.

It’s now over a month since the Canelo-Lara fight, and we’re still not hearing what the results are. Usually when a fight brings in big PPV numbers, the numbers are released to the public quickly. But when a fight does poorly on PPV, then you get a long delay.

This obviously isn’t a good sign for Canelo and Golden Boy Promotions because it suggests that Canelo hasn’t achieved the popularity at this point where he can bring in the kind of PPV numbers that guys like Floyd Mayweather Jr and Manny Pacquiao can.

Some of the things that are probably hurting Canelo was how poor he looked against Austin Trout, Mayweather and of course Lara.

Canelo appeared to lose all three of those fights, not just the Mayweather bout. When fans decide on whether they want to pay $60-70 for a PPV event, they want to make sure they’re paying to see an actual star with amazing talent, not someone who I winning controversial decisions.

Canelo defeated Lara by a 12 round split decision that could have easily gone the other way. In fact, many boxing fans, writers and even fighters saw Lara winning the fight. Canelo was missing punches all night long and taking clean shots from Lara each time he threw a shot.

The smart thing for Canelo to have done would have been to give Lara a rematch in order to clear up the controversy with the decision, but Canelo and Golden Boy Promotions aren’t interested in making that fight again.

That’s unfortunate though because it makes Canelo will take a further hit on his popularity because of many boxing fans feeling like he was given a gift decision over Lara instead of legitimate win.