Oscar De La Hoya pitches Jaime Munguia vs David Benavidez fight

Promoter Oscar De La Hoya says that Jaime Munguia is “very interested” in a potential fight with David Benavidez, as he looks to maneuver Munguia into a big fight after openly rejecting Eddie Hearn’s idea for Edgar Berlanga and Munguia to fight.

De La Hoya recently pitched — not to anyone in particular, perhaps, but pitched — a fight between the two:

You’ll recall that this past weekend, we looked at De La Hoya rejecting the Munguia vs Berlanga idea, and talked about how Oscar’s remarks regarding Hearn and Matchroom were a pretty clear mirror held to Golden Boy’s situation the last few years, too.

De La Hoya trying to land Munguia a fight with Premier Boxing Champions’ Benavidez is in itself just fine, it’s a potentially great fight. But you’ll probably remember that De La Hoya spent a long time supposedly trying to get Munguia a fight with PBC’s Jermall Charlo, and that never happened. He also took many shots at Al Haymon for not doing business with other promoters.

Now, De La Hoya seems to be angling to be a Haymon pal, but the companies have not worked together much at all in their histories. They did do the Gervonta Davis vs Ryan Garcia fight, which everyone agreed was a pretty one-sided deal in PBC’s favor — at Garcia’s insistence, in order to get it done — and other than that, the relations between the companies have been somewhere between “cold” and “frozen” since PBC began, with Haymon breaking off with a bunch of fighters whom Golden Boy had previously had on their shows.

Will Benavidez vs Munguia happen? Probably not. Is this more political posturing than anything else? Yeah, probably. But you can’t blame De La Hoya from sensing that the sharks are circling Matchroom’s stable right now, and wanting to get in good with the sharks so as to potentially avoid being their next target — because, again, the situations at Matchroom and Golden Boy are currently very similar.

And if a deal can be done, then great! It would absolutely be a PBC and Showtime pay-per-view, perhaps a lesser version of the Tank vs Garcia deal that involved DAZN, because they are the ones with decent options for Benavidez in-house, Munguia has little at Golden Boy.

If Benavidez doesn’t fight Munguia — again, this is the likely outcome — there’s always the David Morrell Jr fight, or maybe even a stay-busy this fall, in order to save him for a possible May 2024 date with Canelo Alvarez, who just signed a deal with PBC. Demetrius Andrade is also out there.

For Munguia, if he doesn’t get Benavidez and Oscar further rejects doing a Berlanga fight, their best options might be, like, Shane Mosley Jr or Erik Bazinyan, someone around that level.