By Dan Ambrose: Golden Boy Promotions is looking to have former three division world champion Miguel Cotto (37-4, 30 KO’s) ready to go on September 14th to face their highly hyped fighter WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (42-0-1, 30 KO’s) if Floyd Mayweather Jr. fails to agree to face Canelo on that date.
That’s the fight that Golden Boy wants to put together, but Mayweather isn’t saying whether he’ll agree to face the much heavier Canelo, who came into his last fighting weighing 172 lbs against WBA junior middleweight champion Austin Trout.
Question: Why would Canelo want to fight Cotto when he’s lost his last two fights? I don’t understand that at all.
According to Primerahora.com, Miguel Cotto will be the guy that Golden Boy tries to match Canelo with if Mayweather shows no interest in fighting him on September 14th. Golden Boy wants to stage the fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada, where Mayweather routinely fights.
Cotto hasn’t won a fight in two years since beating a past his prime Antonio Margarito by a 10th round stoppage. Cotto looked good in that fight, but he started to take punishment in the 9th and it’s still unknown what would have happened had the ringside doctor not advised that the fight be halted due to Margarito’s recently surgically operated on right eye closing up.
The fight was a farce to begin with due to Margarito not having fought in over a year and coming off of three separate eye surgeries. There was no tune-up for him and the fight was made anyway despite the high possibilities that his eye might have problems.
Cotto looked better in his next fight against Mayweather last year in May, but that was with a weight advantage of 10 pounds over Mayweather. Cotto came into the fight at 165 lbs compared to Mayweather’s 154 and that helped him because he was so much heavier.
Mayweather had never fought anyone as heavy as this before he struggled.
If Mayweather had problems with the 165 pound Cotto, just imagine how many problems he’d have against the 172 lb. Canelo Alvarez. Fighting a guy that’s 20 pounds heavier than you has got to be incredibly difficult.
Canelo defeated Trout by a 12 round decision by some lopsided scores that still have boxing fans wondering what the two judges were thinking that gave him the win by the scores 118-109 and 116-111. The fight was held under semi-open scoring, one of the World Boxing Council’s ideas.
It enabled Canelo, a fighter who tends to have stamina problems, to conserve his energy and fight sparingly after the scores were announced in the 4th and 8th rounds with two of the judges giving Canelo a huge lead despite the fact that he was getting hit more, not throwing as many punches, and not fighting as hard as Trout.
I think more than anything that fight may have cooled Mayweather’s interest in fighting Canelo because who wants to fight a guy and outland him and outwork him and find yourself trailing by a huge margin on the scorecards, and who wants to fight in Texas with open scoring? I don’t blame Mayweather for not showing a lot of interest in fighting Canelo. Plus, Canelo has that huge weight advantage with him weighing as much as super middleweights like Andre Ward.
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