By Aaron Klein: In easily the biggest, toughest fight of his short boxing career WBA welterweight champion Miguel Cotto (32-0, 26 KOs) will be putting both his unbeaten record and title on the line against the punching machine Mexican Antonio Margarito (36-5, 26 KOs) this Saturday night in a 12-round bout at the MGM Grand, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Cotto, 27, a former light welterweight, is going up against one of the biggest welterweights he’s faced since moving up to the division in December 2006. Up to this point, Cotto has faced mostly smaller, less offensively skillful welterweights than Margarito, ones that he could either out-slug or out-out-punch on the inside.

However, he may need to find a new way to win if he plans on being successful against Margarito, who appears to be a level or two above the competition that Cotto has faced thus far since moving up to the welterweight division. That’s not a knock on fighters like Zab Judah, Shane Mosley, Oktay Urkal, Carlos Quintana or Alfonso Gomez, because each of them are good fighters, but as far as being in the same class as Margarito, they’re clearly not.

Mosley, Judah and Quintana, though good, would be hopelessly over their head if they were put in the ring with a human buzz saw like Margarito, and would very likely get torpedoed in short order, much in the same way that former IBF welterweight champion Kermit Cintron was twice mowed down by Margarito.

What, then, can the smaller, less active Cotto do to stem the flow of punches that are going to be coming in at him from all angles on Saturday night? First off, Cotto’s going to have to try and stay on the outside as much as possible, to try and avoid getting into a war that he can’t win against the more offensively skilled Margarito. If he makes the mistake of standing directly in front of Margarito, Cotto, who averages around 50 punches thrown per round, will get crushed by the 100 shots that are rained down on him by the bigger Margarito.

In most fights, Cotto gets by with his ability to hurt or stop his opponents, but on Saturday night, he’ll be facing perhaps the worst opponent imaginable for his style of fighting, for Margarito doesn’t get hurt, not ever. Sure, he can be cut, he can be hit low, if that’s what it takes, but he can’t be hurt or beaten in a fair fight by a shorter fighter than him. Not even Floyd Mayweather Jr., a fighter at one time considered to be the top pound for pound fighter in boxing, wanted to mix it up with the likes of Margarito.

The only fighter that could beat him, though narrowly, was the tall 6′2″ Paul Williams, who beat him by not letting up on him for one instant, out-punching by a small margin in every round. Both fighters averaged between 90 and 100 punches thrown in every round, yet even then, Williams barely beat Margarito, losing almost every round in the second half of the fight. In Cotto’s case, he can’t punch nearly as often as Williams, hence he’s going to have to hope and pray that he can hurt Margarito somehow.

He won’t be hurting him to the head that much is for sure, because Margarito has a head like a piece of granite rock. You can hit it, maybe chip it, but it’s not going to break no matter how many times he’s hit. This leaves Cotto with one hope, that is, to try and hurt Margarito with a big body shot, and then pray that he can keep him down if he can score a knockdown somehow.

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