By Chris Williams: Bob Arum of Top Rank doesn’t want to put together the fight that many boxing fans want to see between WBC middleweight title holder Miguel Cotto (39-4, 32 KO’s) and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (43-1-1, 31 KO’s) this year. Instead, Arum thinks the Cotto-Canelo fight will do better if he lets it marinate until next year in May at which point he plans on sticking it on Cinco de Mayo.
It’s obviously a terrible idea, because Arum isn’t going to kick a star like Floyd Mayweather Jr off of his fight date. Mayweather hasn’t come out and put dibs on the May 2nd Cinco de Mayo holiday weekend yet, but it kind of goes without say, doesn’t it? Mayweather always fights in September and May, and he’s impossible to move off those dates due to his huge popularity.
It probably makes more sense for us to do a Cotto-Canelo fight next year on Cinco de Mayo weekend,” Arum said to Dan Rafael of ESPN.
That’s not going to work if Mayweather decides he wants to fight someone like Danny Garcia, Shawn Porter or Keith Thurman on that date. If Arum gets stubborn about it and chooses to go ahead with the Cotto-Canelo fight anyway on the May 2nd date, we could see the PPV numbers being far less if Mayweather fights on the same date.
Boxing fans aren’t going to be able to afford both PPV fights. The average boxing fan won’t be able to afford shell out $140 for two PPV cards on the same night. Fans can definitely TIVo it, but they’re not going to want to dump all that good cash on two cards. And I’d be willing to guess that the majority of the fans will choose to see the unbeaten Mayweather fight rather than Canelo and Cotto. Those are guys that Mayweather already beat, so it would be like a consolation bracket for the fighters that were beaten by Mayweather.
One other reason why Arum shouldn’t wait until May to match Cotto and Canelo is the fact that both of them are so beatable. The chances are high that either one of these guys could get beaten before they face each other next year. By letting the Canelo-Cotto fight marinate, Arum might end up spoiling the broth again with them getting beaten. We saw that happen with Arum letting the Juan Manuel Lopez vs. Yuriorkis Gamboa fight marinate for years. He finally waited so long that Lopez got beaten twice. And after that, no one wanted to see Lopez-Gamboa.
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