De La Hoya: Cotto-Canelo is off the table, 5th deadline missed by Cotto

By Boxing News - 01/17/2015 - Comments

canelo6767By Dan Ambrose: It looks like the fight between WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (39-4, 32 KOs) and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (44-1-1, 31 KOs) has finally officially bit the dust.

Golden Boy Promotions president Oscar De La Hoya is saying that the Cotto-Canelo fight is now off the table due to the 34-year-old Cotto having missed a 5th deadline to make the fight happen, according to Dan Rafael of ESPN.

“Oscar just told me no Cotto-Canelo. ‘The deal is off the table.’ Said Cotto went past 5th deadline last night. #boxing,” Rafael said on his twitter.

This comes to no surprise because the 24-year-old Canelo already gave De La Hoya his marching orders this week that he’s tired of waiting for Cotto to sign the contract for their bout, and that he wants De La Hoya to find him another opponent to fight.

De La Hoya moved quickly and spoke to Top Rank promoter Bob Arum, and he’s offering up former WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley for Canelo to fight. De La Hoya hasn’t said whether that’s a suitable opponent or not, but you can guess that he’ll go for the idea because Bradley’s no threat to De La Hoya’s golden goose due to the 5’6” Bradley’s lack of size and power. Canelo would be sporting a three inch height advantage along with a likely 10-15 pound weight advantage in a fight against Bradley.

Cotto’s management team reportedly have had the contract from Canelo for a while now, but they’ve not signed it for some reason. It’s thought that Cotto is waiting for the smoke to clear from the Floyd Mayweather Jr vs. Manny Pacquiao negotiations before he makes a decision on his next fight.

The idea is Cotto would be the plan-B option for Mayweather if the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight doesn’t go down. Cotto would then get a nice payday fight against Mayweather before then taking on Canelo at a later date. It would be a smart move by Cotto, because he could get two fights instead of one.

If he were to take the Canelo fight now and possibly lose, then that would obviously erase any chance of Cotto getting a Mayweather fight. But Cotto loses nothing if he faces Mayweather and is beaten again, because Canelo will still likely fight him due to him needing Cotto’s scalp in order to cement himself as a top pay-per-view attraction in the United States.

Canelo would really impress a lot of boxing fans if he were to push De La Hoya into matching him against WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin. That would win Canelo a lot of respect from fans, but I doubt he’ll do that. He’ll very likely accept Bradley as his opponent so that he can keep winning.

Golovkin would likely overpower Canelo and turn him into mincemeat in a methodical beat down. Besides that, Canelo would have to really press De La Hoya hard in order to have him matched against Golovkin. De La Hoya would likely try and block that move due to the high risk involved for Canelo against a talented fighter like Golovkin.



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