By Thomas Hanson: WBA welterweight champion Miguel Cotto (32-0, 26 KOs) faces his toughest opponent of his boxing career against Antonio Margarito (36-5, 26 KOs) on Saturday night at the MGM Grand, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Cotto, 27, has been portrayed by most fans and writers as the perfect fighter on earth, a young talent without any defects whatsoever and almost destined to stay unbeaten for his entire career. As most Cotto fans would tell it, he’s going to make easy work of Margarito, who stands no chance against Cotto. I’m not sure if what they say is correct, since Cotto hasn’t exactly impressed in fights against Zab Judah, Shane Mosley, Oktay Urkal, Paul Malignaggi, Mohamad Abdulaev and DeMarcus Corley.
Cotto did enough to get wins out of every bout, but he didn’t look like the phenom that most boxing fans are making him out to be. To me, he looked good, but not a fighter in the class of a young Sugar Ray Leonard or Tommy Hearns, both of whom I could see beating Cotto with little problems due to his lack of hand speed, movement and one-punch knockout power. This brings us to Cotto’s bout with Margarito on Saturday night. Cotto is going against an opponent in Margarito who has a chin clearly much better than him, and who has a work rate which is twice the level of his. This means that Cotto is going to have to find another way to win if his attempt at scoring a knockout doesn’t happen.
I doubt seriously that he’s going to be able to hurt Margarito enough stagger him or drop him in the fight. Without this happening, Cotto is going to have to try and match Margarito somehow with an equally high work rate. I like Cotto, and I think he’s capable of showing us a lot of new wrinkles and abilities in his offense, but I think it’s safe to say that he won’t be throwing anywhere near 100 punches per round on Saturday night.
His body just isn’t made to do that, and even under the best of circumstances, I don’t see him ever in his entire life throwing a 100 punches in a single round. This is why I think he’s going to have to use another option, preferably by either clinching constantly like Bernard Hopkins does now that he’s gotten older and slowed down, or by choosing to stay on the outside and use his jab as his main weapon. Perhaps the best scheme would be for Cotto to use a blend of each style, sometimes boxing from the outside using his jab mainly, coming inside and slugging for brief stretches of time and then getting away to safety.
Cotto’s chin isn’t stable enough, his work rate not good enough, for him to stay in front of Margarito for the full 12-rounds, and if he believes in his own hype, he’s going to get taken out by the bigger, better offensively gifted Margarito, who has very few weaknesses when it comes to his offense. I’m hoping that for Cotto’s sake, he’s smart enough to understand that he’s not in the same class as Margarito in terms of offensive skills and will use his ring smarts to try and work around him, and try to befuddle Margarito, making him frustrated.
The worse thing that Cotto can do is watch Margarito’s fight against Paul Williams, a fight that Margarito lost when he was outworked by Williams in a close fight, and think, ‘why can’t I do that?’ The fact is, Cotto can’t do what Williams did, because he’s not as big, as active and as strong-chinned as Williams. If he thinks he can follow the same mode of fighting as Williams, I predict with a 100% accuracy that Margarito will take Cotto out just as easy as he did Kermit Cintron, whom he took out twice in 5th and 6th round knockouts.