Cotto-Margarito: Why is Miguel so convinced that Margarito fought with loaded handwraps?

By Boxing News - 11/25/2011 - Comments

Image: Cotto-Margarito: Why is Miguel so convinced that Margarito fought with loaded handwraps?By Dan Ambrose: It’s disappointing to hear WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto complaining about how he feels that Antonio Margarito fought with loaded hand wraps three years ago when Cotto got blasted apart by Margarito in 11 rounds.

I don’t know why Cotto is doing this to himself. He doesn’t know for a fact that Margarito fought him with plaster in his hand wraps and will never know. For this reason, Cotto just needs to accept that he got beat by the better man instead of getting angry and calling Margarito a criminal.

It’s such a waste of time, and Cotto is doing it to himself. He’s making himself angry by thinking something that is likely not even true. Don’t you think if Margarito had a habit of fighting guys with loaded hand wraps that it would have been discovered his past fights against guys like Kermit Cintron, Paul Williams and Daniel Santos? I’m pretty sure those fighters had someone watching Margarito get taped up and they would have seen any plaster if he had been loading his hand wraps.

If Cotto wants to get angry at anybody for him getting his face beaten up and torn apart in the Margarito fight, he should look at himself. Had Cotto come in better shape to run for 12 rounds instead of just 9, he would have saved himself a lot of punishment. He also could have saved himself from running out of gas if he didn’t move quite so much in the first nine rounds.

Sure, Cotto needed to move, but he didn’t need to move as much as he did. He could have spaced the moving around out so that he wouldn’t run out of gas. I knew after watching the first four rounds that Cotto would eventually gas out because he was running like no tomorrow and he didn’t look good. He doesn’t have the slender build of a mover and I knew there was going to be problems by the 10th round for him. And sure enough, Cotto completely faded by the 10th, and that I feel is the main reason he took a beating. He was too tired to fight and leaned forward and got hurt with an uppercut from Margarito.

Now Margarito isn’t the biggest puncher in the world, but he can really punch when he’s throwing uppercuts. And when you take a short guy like 5’7” Cotto and have him leaning forward in an already fatigued state, it makes it easy for a guy like Margarito to hurt him.



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