De La Hoya: This is the perfect time for Cotto to fight Mayweather

By Boxing News - 04/17/2012 - Comments

Image: De La Hoya: This is the perfect time for Cotto to fight MayweatherBy Dan Ambrose: Golden Boy Promotions president Oscar De La Hoya thinks that Floyd Mayweather Jr. is more vulnerable now to getting beaten than he ever has in the past as he heads into his mega fight against WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto next month. De La Hoya doesn’t say why he feels that way, only that he thinks that Cotto is getting Mayweather at the exact right time in his career.

De La Hoya said this as quoted by fightnews.com “If there is a perfect time to beat Mayweather, it is now. No fighter is invincible.”

That may be but I don’t think Cotto is the one to do it nor do I see Manny Pacquiao. Those fighters are too, too flawed to beat a guy like Mayweather. The one that has the best chance of beating Mayweather is former WBC middleweight champion Sergio Martinez. It’ll take a bigger fighter with one-punch knockout power like Martinez to finally give Mayweather his first loss of his career. Cotto won’t be the guy because he’s had too many wars’ and he’s not been the same fighter since his defeat at the hands of Antonio Margarito in 2008. He’s looked like a shadow of his former self since that night.

What I don’t like about Cotto right now is his over reliance on his new trainer Pedro Diaz. It’s like Cotto sees Diaz as the magic bottle that has all the answers and will give an escape from having to take responsibility for what happens in the ring. For example in the same interview, when Cotto was asked about what he’s spotted in watching some of Mayweather’s training video, Cotto said “My work is just to train. Pedro studies the tapes and I follow him.”

I’m sorry but I don’t enlist in that kind of passivity. A fighter has a trainer to help him with his training, but he doesn’t have all the answers. You got to second guess them and come up with what works. Some of the stuff trainers say is good, but a lot of it a fighter would be better off ignoring and coming up with what really works. If Cotto hands over all of his thinking to Diaz, he’s going to get beaten up by Mayweather on May 5th because Diaz won’t be out there to hold Cotto’s hand in the fight and telling him which punches to throw and which to block. Cotto needs to break free from whatever thoughts he has about Diaz having all the answers because he doesn’t.



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