By Chris Williams: The December 3rd rematch between WBA Super World light middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (36-2, 29 KO’s) and Antonio Margarito (28-7, 27 KO’s) will be shown on pay per view by HBO instead of Showtime PPV, according to news from Dan Rafael. For boxing fans, this matters little because it’s still going to be a PPV bout.

However, with it being shown on HBO instead of Showtime, it could mean that potentially more boxing fans will see the fight because HBO is bigger. The rematch is clearly way late in the game right now with Margarito coming off a bad injury to Manny Pacquiao last December.

Margarito suffered a broken right orbital bone in that fight and went through surgery recently to fix the problem. With an injury as bad as that one, it’s surprising that Margarito is being put in a rematch with Cotto at this time. Normally, fighters coming off of serious career threatening injuries like the one Margarito suffered tend to take one or two tune-ups to work their way back into a title fight.

However, Margarito is going straight from a bad beating against Pacquiao into a rematch with Cotto, and boxing fans will be expected to pay to see this? Does seem like a rush job to you? It does to me. I get the impression that this is fight where we have to aging fighters about to go stale and it’s being pushed forward as quick as possible, even though one of them probably shouldn’t be fighting a high level guy like Cotto right now given the injuries Margarito sustained in his last fight.

The Margarito-Cotto fight is the only fight that’s been confirmed for the December 3rd card, but they’re going to have to put an awful lot of quality fights on the undercard for this to be a PPV worthy card. Margarito hasn’t beaten a top level fighter since his win over Cotto in 2008. That’s three years. The only win Margarito has had since then was over some guy named Roberto Garcia in 2010. I think this isn’t a fight that deserves to be on PPV. If Margarito was still fighting well then I could see it, but he’s clearly not.

And Cotto hasn’t had a meaningful fight since he was dominated by Pacquiao two years ago in a 12th round TKO loss in 2009. Cotto’s fights since then have come against the weak punching fellow Top Rank fighter Yuri Foreman and an over-the-hill Ricardo Mayorga. It looks as if Cotto is being spoon fed soft opposition for some reason instead of being matched against tough quality fighters at junior middleweight. I don’t see this as a PPV fight because neither of these guys are beating top level fighters anymore.