Golovkin-Rubio winner will be mandatory for Miguel Cotto

By Boxing News - 10/14/2014 - Comments

golovkin788888By Dan Ambrose: WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto or Saul “Canelo” Alvarez will be facing a tough decision in the near future, as the winner of this Saturday’s boxing clash between WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (30-0, 27 KOs) and Marco Antonio Rubio (59-6-1, 51 KOs) will be the mandatory challenger for the WBA middleweight title.

We don’t know yet whether it’ll be Cotto or Cotto who will be faced with the unpleasant task of fighting the Golovkin-Rubio winner, but one of them will need to make the decision whether it’s worth it to keep the WBC 160 pound title or if it’s better for them to just vacate the strap and look for safer fights that are more winnable.

“The Golovkin-Rubio winner will be mandatory for Miguel Cotto. Just like Gennady has to play chess in the ring with his knockout strategy, I have to play chess outside the ring to force people either to give up titles or… to fight Gennady. We’re building a true world champion,” said Golovkin’s promoter Tom Loeffer of K2 Promotions to Fightnews.com.

Golovkin will very likely make easy work of Rubio on Saturday night. This really isn’t a fight. Rubio has good power, but he’s so, so slow and he’s just made to order for Golovkin. It’s the perfect opponent for Golovkin to dismantle on HBO. It’s a credit to Rubio for taking the fight, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s way out of his league in taking this fight. Golovkin would obviously rather take on Canelo or Cotto, but he’s had zero luck in getting either of them to agree to a fight against him. Loeffler has had equally bad luck in trying to get Peter Quillin and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr to agree to a fight against Golovkin.

Cotto should do the right thing and face the Golovkin vs. Rubio winner in early 2015 in order to show boxing fans that he’s not a paper champion, but that’s not likely to happen. Cotto will probably make a business decision and face the 24-year-old Canelo instead because that’s the bigger money fight and the one that gives Cotto the better chance of holding onto his WBC title.

Cotto picked up the WBC 160 pound title last June when he beat the shot-looking 39-year-old Sergio Martinez by a 10th round knockout. Sergio fought poorly with his surgically repaired right knee wobbling each time he’d get hit hard. Cotto’s trainer Freddie Roach said that Martinez was in his prime at the time of the fight, but that clearly wasn’t the case. Martinez looked bad even before he was first hit. His legs looked weak under him, and he moved like he was fighting on a pair of stilts.

Before the fight, Martinez had been out of the ring for 14 months while recovering from his second knee surgery on his right knee, which he tore up during his September 2012 fight against former WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. It was good match-making for Cotto and Roach to scout out Martinez and pick him to fight instead of Golovkin, but it also made them look like they were cherry picking instead of picking out the best in the division.



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