By Dan Ambrose: It seems that former WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (37-3, 30 KO’s) isn’t pleased with the scoring for his 12 round unanimous decision loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. (43-0, 26 KO’s) last Saturday night. I don’t see what the problem is. The judges scored it 117-111, 117-111, and 118-110.
Those were pretty much my scores, as well as Harold Lederman from HBO, and a lot of fans. Are we all wrong?
Cotto said on his twitter “Nothing to be down about. I respect the judges dec. but I completely disagree.”
It’s too bad Cotto didn’t enlighten us to what specifically he disagreed with because we’re left to wonder what has gotten stuck in his craw. Did Cotto believe he should have won the fight? Or does he just think that the scores should have been a little closer? I’m good with the scores that handed down, but even if they were closer, Cotto still lost.
A loss is loss, as far as I’m concerned. He got beat and failed to do what had to do in the championship rounds. I hope Cotto doesn’t think he did well in the last four rounds, because if you look at the fight objectively, Mayweather controlled the last four rounds with his boxing ability. He stopped trying to brawl with Cotto and went back to basic boxing and that bailed him out of a deep hole that he dug for himself by choosing to fight Cotto’s game by slugging with him in the first eight rounds.
I think Mayweather finally got a clue that he couldn’t beat Cotto with that kind of fight plan after taking punishment in the 8th round. Instead, Mayweather went back to normal fighting style of hitting, moving and making his opponents miss. When Mayweather went to that style, he never lost another round and dominated the last four rounds of the fight. Had Mayweather fought with that style in the first eight rounds, he would have easily won the fight and no one would be saying what a great job that Cotto did.
Mayweather said it himself after the fight that he chose to fight Cotto in a toe-to-toe style in order to please the millions of fans that paid to watch the fight on pay-per-view at in the audience at the fight. In hindsight, it was a mistake for Mayweather to fight Cotto’s style because Mayweather didn’t have the power or the size to fight in that manner. It was painfully obvious early on that trying to slug with Cotto was a bad idea for Mayweather he didn’t have the speed or the power of Manny Pacquiao, a fighter that really dominated Cotto from start to finish.
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