By Chris Williams: Rather than put newly crowned WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (39-4, 32 KO’s) in with someone from his own weight class that could give him a good fight like Gennady Golovkin, Peter Quillin, Curtis Stevens, Daniel Jacobs or David Lemieux, Top Rank promoter Bob Arum is talking about wanting to match Cotto vs. the recently beaten former WBO 147 pound champion Tim Bradley (31-1, 12 KO’s) for later this year in December on HBO pay-per-view.
Arum had been talking about wanting to match Bradley up against Cotto in the days following Cotto’s win over Sergio Martinez, but now Arum is starting to sound more serious wanting to match the Cotto-Bradley mismatch. The fight would be on HBO pay-per-view, not on regular HBO where you don’t have to shell out cash to see the fight.
Arum wants to stage the fight at Madison Square Garden in New York in order to take advantage of Cotto’s large fan base over there. Cotto can sell out MSG no matter who he’s matched against. Bradley doesn’t have a fan base to speak of, so we’re probably talking about PPV buys in the 200,000 region, and obviously far below the disappointing 350,000 buys that Cotto-Martinez churned out this month.
“We’re thinking about the possibility of making Cotto and (Timothy) Bradley,” Arum said to Dan Rafael of ESPN. “We’re talking but we’d have to work (the weight) out. We haven’t gotten that far yet.”
I think it’s a really bad idea for Arum to match Cotto against Bradley, because it’s not going to be a good fight due to the movement that Bradley will be showing. But you can kind of see why Arum is putting Bradley in with Cotto. Arum doesn’t need Cotto to get beaten, because he’s got a big money fight against Saul “Canelo” Alvarez that Arum wants to schedule in early 2015.
Arum could match Cotto against a middleweight or a junior middleweight contender, but he’d be at risk against someone in their prime and not 40-years-old with a bum knee and coming off of a 14 month layoff. If you put Cotto in with someone like Gennady Golovkin, which is easily the best fighter in the division, Cotto will most likely take a beating and get knocked out. Then Arum would be matching a beaten Cotto against Canelo next May. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t pay to see a Cotto-Canelo fight under those circumstances.
With Bradley coming off of a one-sided loss to Pacquiao last April, I really don’t know how Arum can see a Cotto-Bradley fight. If he makes it complimentary or if he makes a steep discount on the PPV price to say $4.99, I think it would be worth for that price. But you don’t pull the full sticker price on a fight where one of the guys was just beaten the way Bradley was by Pacquiao. It wasn’t even a close fight.
If you’ve got some old meat at the local grocery store you’re trying to sell, you don’t stick the full price on it. You got to discount that stuff so that the shoppers don’t feel like they’re getting a bad deal. That’s why I think Bradley vs. Cotto would be halfway decent fight if Arum dropped the price to a bargain basement price. Frankly, I don’t see the fight as an HBO fight. To me, it’s ESPN all the way. I doubt it very much that Arum is going to lower the price of the Cotto-Bradley fight. It’ll likely be sold for $70 a pop. You would like to think that it would have a good undercard with it, but we haven’t seen good undercards lately.
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