By Dan Ambrose: While the 24-year-old Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (44-1-1, 31 KOs) is currently belt-less in terms of titles, and is coming off of a fight against Erislandy Lara that many boxing fans felt that he lost, Canelo is saying that he won’t wait much longer for WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (39-4, 32 KOs) to decide whether he’ll fight him or not next on Canelo’s chosen date of May 2nd.
Canelo says he gave the 34-year-old Cotto what he wanted in the contract negotiations, and he doesn’t understand why he’s not signing the contract. Unfortunately for Canelo, it doesn’t look like he gave Cotto and his management what they wanted as far as the financial part of the contract goes.
Gaby Penagaricano, the adviser for Cotto, says that the financial part of the contract hasn’t been agreed on. This means that Canelo is going to need to get back with his promoter Oscar De La Hoya of Golden Boy Promotions to come back with a better offer to Cotto. It may take considerable movement on Canelo’s part to get to where Cotto agrees to the deal. Canelo could make it easy on himself if he sweetened the deal by giving the Puerto Rican fighter a beefier offer.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” Canelo said via the Spanish news as quoted by RingTV.com. “I already granted Miguel Cotto a lot of things to make this fight happen. It’s been more than a month, and Miguel Cotto hasn’t signed the contract.”
Canelo needs to realize that he’s not negotiating with Alfredo Angulo or someone similar where he’s the clear A-side in the negotiations and can get them to agree to his terms. This is Cotto he’s trying to fight, and it’s not going to be easy to negotiate with him because he’s the B-side now in the negotiations. Canelo is already pushing for the fight to take place on the Mexican holiday of Cinco de Mayo on May 2nd.
This is an A-side move done by a B-side fighter. Cotto obviously doesn’t have to go along with that. Things would probably be a lot easier for Canelo if he let Cotto pick the fight date instead of him saying that he’ll be fighting on May 2nd. When you have a fighter pulling a move like that, it comes across to some like they’re trying to call the shots. Like I said, that would be okay if Canelo were fighting Alfredo Angulo and not Cotto. Instead of Canelo naming the date that he’ll be fighting, he should have left that date open for Cotto to decide. If start out negotiations like that then things are a lot easier, I believe.
“Miguel Cotto has to decide whether or not he wants to fight me,” Canelo said. “I’m not going to wait much longer. I’ll let him make his decision. Hopefully, his decision won’t hurt his country and all of the fans that want this fight.”
This almost sounds like Canelo is trying to call the shots. It shows me that Canelo isn’t patient with the negotiation process, because why would he walk away from the negotiations when Cotto’s adviser clearly said that the financial part still needs work. Canelo should be putting some fire under the backside of De La Hoya to get him to sweeten the offer for Cotto.
The Cotto-Canelo fight is one that Canelo needs more than Cotto, because Canelo clearly needs a big win over Cotto in order to become a big pay-per-view star. After Canelo’s loss to Mayweather and his controversial win over Lara, Canelo needs an important win to get to the next level in terms of the pay-per-view market.
Right now, Canelo is bringing in a little 300,000 pay-per-view buys for his fights on pay-per-view. That suggests that Canelo needs a big win over Cotto to validate his career in the eyes of the boxing public.
Ideally, it would be nice if Canelo could go back and prove that he can beat Lara without controversy, but that probably will never happen. But a win over Cotto will make some boxing fans forget about how poor Canelo looked against Lara, Mayweather and Austin Trout. If Canelo can beat Cotto then the victory could help his career in the same way that Mayweather’s win over De La Hoya made him a big pay-per-view star.
Cotto has a lot of options for backup opponents if the 24-year-old Canelo loses patience. Mayweather would likely be the first option, and that would likely be a bigger fight than Cotto-Canelo due to Mayweather being a far bigger star in the United States than the red-haired Canelo. It’s not that Canelo isn’t a big star, because he certainly is in his native Mexico. However, the PPV buys are coming from the United States, not Mexico.
Mayweather is the king of the PPV market in the U.S, whereas Canelo is someone just starting out with far lower numbers. It’s unclear whether Canelo will ever get to the level where Mayweather is due to Canelo struggling each time he’s stepped up a level against good opposition. If Canelo can’t beat guys like Lara without controversy then it’s going to be difficult for him to become a huge PPV attraction, because that’s a red flag that he can’t beat a guy like that.
Comments are closed.