By Dan Ambrose: WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto has been saying again and again that if he had fought Floyd Mayweather Jr. before Cotto had avenged his loss to Antonio Margarito last December, Cotto would lose to Mayweather.
Beating Margarito was that important for Cotto to give him back his lost self confidence from his beat down against Margarito in 2008, when Margarito still fully in his prime.
Cotto said this as quoted by ESPN “If this fight happened before December 3rd, it wouldn’t have been the right moment for this fight. Now is the right moment for the fight.”
I can recognize that self confidence is an extremely important thing for a fighter to him, but what I don’t understand is how Cotto will be changed much. He’s still a flawed fighter with way too many holes his game to beat a fighter like Mayweather, even if what Cotto says is true about his shattered self belief now restored.
I have a hard time buying it that a win over a now almost completely shot Margarito is enough to restore any fighters’ self confidence. I mean, isn’t Cotto aware that Margarito hadn’t fought in over a year when he took him on last December? Doesn’t Cotto know that Margarito had not one but three separate surgeries on his right eye going into his fight with Cotto?
Margarito took no tune-ups after having three surgeries to repair a fractured right orbital bone. It just looked like he was asking for trouble by going into a fight like that off of that many surgeries on his eye. Even with Margarito’s bad eye swelling up on him in the 9th round to the point where he pretty couldn’t see out of it, he STILL was pounding Cotto that round and there are more than a few boxing fans who think Margarito would have knocked Cotto out had the fight been allowed to continue.
How Cotto could get confidence off of a fight like that is beyond me. If I was Cotto, my confidence would be even less than it was before because Margarito was turning the fight around and it looked like the fight was heading for a repeat of the first beat down had the ringside doctor not stopped it.
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