Cotto to fight in the fall, says Schaefer

By Boxing News - 01/29/2013 - Comments

cotto7By Dan Ambrose: Miguel Cotto (37-4, 30 KO’s) will be getting a good long rest after absorbing a lot of punishment in consecutive losses to Floyd Mayweather Jr. and WBA junior middleweight champion Austin Trout in 2012. According to Dan Rafael of ESPN, Golden Boy Promotions CEO Richard Schaefer says the 32-year-old Cotto will be resting up until the fall (September, October and November) before he fights again.

In other words, Cotto will only be fighting once in 2013 unless he somehow gets selected by WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez to fight on May 4th. That’s not likely because Trout has been mentioned as a strong possibility to fight Alvarez on that date, and if not him then Alfredo Angulo will be a strong candidate to be fighting Alvarez.

Perhaps it’s for the best that Cotto rest up after his two hard fights against Mayweather and Trout because he got hit a lot in both of those fights and it can’t be good for him to be soaking up that kind of punishment at this stage in his career. Cotto will be turning 33 on October 29th of this year and he’s going to have to be wise about the fights he takes.

There are really not too many big fights out there for Cotto unless he can coax Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao into fighting him again. A fight against Canelo likely won’t bring Cotto the kind of money that he’s enjoyed in the past because Canelo still isn’t at the stage of a Mayweather of Pacquiao in terms of popularity yet.

Canelo needs to prove himself with boxing fans because they’ve started to notice that Golden Boy mainly just matches him against smaller, older and shot fighters, and they want to see if the 22-year-old can actually beat a relevant fighter with talent like Trout.

For this reason it’s perhaps not in Cotto’s interest to fight Canelo until he’s made more of a name for himself, but that’s the problem. It might take Canelo a lot longer if he can’t get a fight against Mayweather, and if Golden Boy won’t put him in with Trout to prove that he’s not an overhyped paper champion.



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