Cotto to fight in May or June

By Boxing News - 02/06/2015 - Comments

cotto674By Dan Ambrose: WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (39-4, 32 KOs) will be making his first and possibly his only defense of his WBC title in May or June against a still to be determined opponent. His adviser Gaby Peñagaricano says they could make an announcement next week as to who the opponent will be.

There’s no question that Cotto will have a lot of pressure on him to select a high caliber opponent due to the criticism he’s received for picking 39-year-old Sergio Martinez to fight in his last bout for the WBC title. Martinez looked old, shot and hobbled with him fighting on his surgically repaired right knee.

The knee did not look strong, and he didn’t look like the same fighter who’d dominated the middleweight division years earlier. Cotto needs to fight a legitimate fighter, and not a welterweight. It’s going to make Cotto look really bad if he faces a tiny welterweight like Tim Bradley to defend his WBC 160lb title.

What’s going to look really bad is if Cotto vacates his WBC title shortly thereafter rather than defending it against his WBC mandatory challenger Gennady Golovkin. The combination of Cotto winning the WBC title from the nearly 40-year-old Sergio Martinez, then defending it against a welterweight, and then vacating it rather than fighting Golovkin, it’ll have some boxing fans thinking Cotto is just looking to take the easy fights.

“We are working with potential opponents and we want to reserve their names because we are in negotiations,” Penagaricano said via Univision Deportes. “I think that next week will mature the matter in order to make the announcement. First he tried to fight with ‘Canelo’ in New York. The parties attempted to the fight in good faith but not succeeded. We have been moving toward a plan ‘B’ and I think we are in a close future.”

Cotto had a chance to fight Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, but the negotiations weren’t completed. Canelo finally got tired of attempting to negotiate the fight, and just walked away out of frustration.

It wouldn’t be so bad if Cotto were to face Floyd Mayweather Jr next if Mayweather doesn’t fight Manny Pacquiao. However, the odds of Cotto getting Mayweather is extremely low, as Mayweather will very likely face Pacquiao next. Without that fight, Cotto won’t be able to get the same free pass from boxing fans if he fights the smaller Bradley. You have to remember that Bradley is coming off of a 12 round draw against Diego Chavez in a fight where Bradley took a lot of punishment. Fighting Bradley at this stage is just going to look bad, given how poor he looked against Chaves.

Cotto needs to fight an actual middleweight in order to show the boxing fans that he’s not a paper champion who won a world title against an older time in Sergio Martinez. Cotto’s trainer Freddie Roach is the one who spotted the age in Martinez after seeing how he struggled against Martin Murray in his previous fight. Cotto really needs to fight someone like David Lemieux, Hassan N’Dam or Tureano Johnson to show that he’s capable of defending his WBC title against the contenders in the division.



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