Cotto could miss Bundrage fight, Heiland now in spotlight

By Boxing News - 03/24/2015 - Comments

cotto664By Dan Ambrose: WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto has been linked to a fight against 41-year-old IBF junior middleweight champion Cornelius ”K-9” Bundrage for June 6th.

While it’s not a great fight or even a good fight, it’s the one that Cotto’s team have been rumored to be going after. But it looks like Cotto could miss out on the Bundrage fight, because Top Rank is interested in matching former two division world champion Tim Bradley against Bundrage. It’s a bad match-up for Bradley.

He’s only 5’6” and nowhere as big or as strong as Bundrage. If Cotto doesn’t get the Bundrage fight, then the new option will be #1 WBC Jorge Sebastian Heiland (25-4-2, 13 KOs). He’s ranked high and he’s at least a real middleweight. He’s not the best fighter in the middleweight, but he’ll make it a decent fight.

The Cotto-Heiland fight, if it gets signed, will take place on June 6th in New York either at the Barclays Center or at Madison Square Garden.

The Bundrage vs. Bradley fight will take place during the summer if they can get it negotiated.

“There is nothing signed, but we are talking with them about that option,” said Top Rank’s Carl Moretti via elnuevodia.com. “The fight (with Bradley) in June, would probably be.”

The southpaw Heiland recently demolished Matthew Macklin in 10 rounds.

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Facing Heiland will put Cotto in a tough situation to ask boxing fans to pay to see the fight on HBO PPV. But Cotto would be in just as tough situation if he selected the 41-year-old Bundrage, because he’s not well-known either with the casual boxing fans.

Cotto needs to get in the ring very soon, because he still hasn’t defended his WBC middleweight title since capturing it last June with a 10th round stoppage win over Sergio Martinez. It’ll have been an entire year since he won the belt by the time he fights in June, if he fights then.

It’s doubtful that Cotto will be all that broken up if the World Boxing Council strips him of his WBC title. Cotto has enough fans that will watch him no matter what.

The titles are less important at this point in Cotto’s career, so he won’t take a hit if the WBC strips him for having sat around for an entire year without defending the title once.

It’s kind of unfair for the contenders in the middleweight division, because it’s obviously not great for their careers when you have an inactive champion like Cotto sitting around and not defending the title for 12 full months after winning it.

The WBC needs to get better at this, because this kind of thing happens way too much. We saw former WBC heavyweight champion Vitali Klitschko sit on his WBC title for over a year without defending it. The title kind of loses meaning when you get a champion that fails to defend it in a timely fashion.

Cotto impressed a lot of boxing fans in his last fight in stopping Sergio Martinez in the 10th round. However, a lot of fans since then have been less impressed after learning that Martinez’s right knee had been surgically operated on in the previous year, and that he’d not fought in 14 months before facing Cotto.

Cotto’s trainer Freddie Roach didn’t help matters by telling the media before the fight that Martinez looked ready for the taking. Boxing fans read that to mean that Martinez looked old and shot enough for Cotto to beat him.



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