By Dan Ambrose: Freddie Roach, the trainer for WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (39-4, 32 KOs), says right now WBC middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (30-0, 27 KOs) isn’t someone they’re looking at to match up against Cotto.
Roach feels that Golovkin brings very little to a Cotto fight because he’s never fought anyone who he feels is a good fighter, and he doesn’t see Golovkin as a pay-per-view fighter. Surprisingly, Roach thinks that Golovkin is a protected fighter because he hasn’t fought the top guys like Peter Quillin and Daniel Jacobs.
Roach says that Golovkin’s management has been careful in the type of guys that they’ve matched him up against, and he sees him as a protected fighter.
“We’re going on December 13th. We’ve got a couple of opponents we’re looking at but nothing has been decided,” Roach said to IFL TV. “As soon as Gabby gets down to 2 to 3 guys, he’ll give me a call. I know Triple-G has been calling him [Cotto] out, but he knows Triple-G brings nothing to the table because he has no pay-per-view audience. I think he’s marketed very bad by his promoters [K2 Promotions]. Well, no one knows him in America, and he’s only fought once on HBO, and I never seen him fight before the other night.”
Golovkin wanted to fight Sergio Martinez for ages before he was beaten recently, but the fight never happened. Golovkin had previously been trying to get former WBA middleweight champion Felix Sturm to fight him, but he went in another direction. Quillin fights on Showtime, while Golovkin fights on HBO. That makes a fight against Quillin and Golovkin impossible. Jacobs fights on Showtime too.
Golovkin would love to take on Jacobs now that he’s the WBA belt holder, but Jacobs says he wants to fight Quillin and defend his title against the top contenders in the division. Jacobs doesn’t want to fight Golovkin right now.
Roach continued “He’s [Golovkin] a good fighter, a good puncher, and guys that are hittable, I like. I think the avoid part is on his people’s behalf. He chose those opponents. He chose to fight opponents at the right time. He’s been well protected. But now he’s at a level where he can fight anybody in the world.”
Roach almost sounds like he’s describing his own fighter Cotto when he talks about Golovkin being well-protected and being matched against opponents at the right time. In other words, Roach is saying that Golovkin is being put in with guys that are starting to slide.
You can put that label on Cotto easily considering that he was recently matched against 39-year-old Sergio Martinez and Delvin Rodriguez, and neither of which were the same fighters they once were at the time Cotto fought him.
Roach wanted to match Cotto against Martinez now because he said he was afraid someone else would get to him first and beat him before Cotto did. That’s why Cotto didn’t fight Canelo this year. They saw weakness in Sergio Martinez so they made that match with him as quick as possible with him coming off of 2 knee surgeries and a year-long layoff.
“But right now with Cotto, we’ve got to fight [Saul] Canelo Alvarez. He’s making a lot of noise out there and selling a lot of tickets,” Roach said. “You’ve got Peter Quillin out there [for Golovkin], and Daniel Jacobs. There’s some top 10 guys out there, but he hasn’t fought any of them yet. In his last fight, he fought a good boxer, but he obviously couldn’t punch that hard and was scared to death in round one.”
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