During a press conference to announce the June 18 fight between Jaime Munguia and Sergey Derevyanchenko, Golden Boy promoter Oscar De La Hoya talks about his plans for Munguia and how they’ve been pursuing a fight against Jermall Charlo — who he doesn’t understand has been able to hold on to his middleweight title for the past couple years.
De La Hoya on the future of Munguia
“Like I said before the Ryan Garcia fight with Tank Davis, it not only gave the fans the best fight that they wanted to watch at the time, but it opened the doors to work with Al Haymon and to push for a fight that Jaime Munguia always wanted, and we obviously know it’s Charlo. And fighting Derevyanchenko is obviously a very tough fight, he’s a warrior, he has fought with the best of the best including Daniel Jacobs and GGG — which I think a lot of people will say Derevyanchenko gave GGG the toughest fight of his career.
“So we want to make the best fights happen and the fact that other fighters were not available at the time, we had to go with Derevyanchenko who is probably the toughest guy that he can face. So I’m hoping that this opens up the doors for future fights with other promoters and we can make the best fights happen for the fans.
On seeing Jermall Charlo at a recent fight
“He appeared (at) two of Golden Boy’s last fights and I feel like he was taunting me and telling me ‘let’s make this fight happen, let’s make the Munguia fight happen.’ And it was music to my ears because that’s the fight that we want, that’s exactly what we want to make happen for the fans. And obviously Charlo has no control of what fights he can make, he has to go through Al Haymon obviously. So I told him, ‘go talk to your people and have ‘em call me, let’s make this fight happen.’
“The bottom line is we’ve always wanted to pursue the very best fights. For some reason the WBC at 160 lbs has been held by Charlo for two years. I don’t understand why, but for two years we felt that Derevyanchenko vs Jaime Munguia should be for the title or to fight for the #1 position. It didn’t happen for some reason. Mauricio Sulaiman did not make that happen, so now we’re fighting at 168 with Munguia and Derevyanchenko. If that fight was ordered to fight for the #1 position, or to fight for the interim title, they would be fighting at 160. So let’s make that clear.”
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