Arum says Canelo vs. Cotto could happen on Cinco de Mayo in 2015; Mayweather pushed off his date?

By Boxing News - 06/16/2014 - Comments

arum999By Dan Ambrose: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum if kicking around the idea of matching WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto against former WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez on Cinco de Mayo in 2015 or possibly this year. If the Canelo-Cotto fight does take place on Cinco de Mayo in 2015, they’ll effectively be pushing Floyd Mayweather Jr off of his date unless he can pick out a star big enough to cause Arum not to want to compete with his fight on that date.

It’ll be difficult for Mayweather to pick someone else popular enough to outperform the Canelo-Cotto fight unless Mayweather were to fight someone like Gennady Golovkin. That’s not going to happen though.

“That’s [Canelo vs. Cotto] a definite possibility. Whether that happens this year or sometime next year at Cinco de Mayo, we’ll have to see,” Arum said.

Arum knows that if he has a Cotto vs. Canelo fight, he would have a big enough fight to force Mayweather off of his date on Cinco de Mayo, because that’s a fight that would easily draw 1.5 million pay-per-view buys or more depending on how Canelo does in his next fight against Erislandy Lara on July 12th. If Canelo comes out of that fight looking great, and if Cotto wins his next fight later this year, then we could see a tremendous fight between the two of them on Cinco de Mayo next year.

It would be the perfect setup for a big money fight along the same lines as Mayweather’s fight against Canelo last year in September. It might even eclipse that fight in terms of PPV numbers. But there’s a big question mark about whether Canelo will be able beat Lara, and whether Cotto will successfully defend his WBC middleweight title. Both guys are vulnerable. They may have looked good in their last fights against Alfredo Angulo and Sergio Martinez, but both fighters are still very flawed.



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