Cotto’s next opponent to be announced in new few days, says Peñagarícano

By Boxing News - 03/18/2015 - Comments

cotto56678By Dan Ambrose: Boxing fans should be learning this week who WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (39-4, 32 KOs) will be facing for his next fight on June 6th in New York. Cotto’s adviser Gabriel Peñagarícano says his opponent should be announced in the next few days.

The opponent is said to be 41-year-old Cornelius Bundrage, the IBF junior middleweight champion. If this is who it’s going to be then there really is no hurry for the announcement, because it’s a less than compelling fight.

Cotto’s fans will argue that he’s at least fighting a world champion, but the problem is Bundrage isn’t a middleweight and he doesn’t have a huge fan base. Cotto could fight WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin if he wanted to, but that doesn’t seem to be on the agenda.

Cotto will need to make a decision about whether he wants to keep his WBC title or not, because the World Boxing Council have said that he’s going to need to face Golovkin after he gets his voluntary defense out of the way in June. If Cotto does fight in June, it’ll have been an entire year since he last fought when he beat a hobbled, ring-rusty, 39-year-old Sergio Martinez by a 10th round stoppage to win the WBC 160 pound title.

“We’re actually discussing names with both HBO and Showtime and seeing how they are willing to approve and then it’s up to Miguel to make a decision,” Peñagarícano said via ESPN Deportes. “It should be coming in the next few days or so.”

Besides the 41-year-old Bundrage, welterweights Tim Bradley and Brandon Rios have been mentioned as possible opponents for the 34-year-old Cotto. Those are good opponents if Cotto was fighting at 140, 147 or 154, but they’re poor opponents for a middleweight champion to fight.

It would be similar to if heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko were to comb the light heavyweight division for his opponents instead of him fighting an actual heavyweight. Wladimir would take major heat if he scouted out a 175 pound fighter and had him move up to heavyweight to fight him.

Cotto recently signed a new fight contract with Roc Nation Sports. The signing could mean that we won’t see Cotto fighting any Top Rank fighters. However, there’s still a possibility that he could wind up facing one of them if he really wants the fight bad enough.

What’s hard to understand is why Cotto is holding onto his WBC middleweight title. If he’s not going to defend it against an actual middleweight then it makes zero sense for him to continue to be the WBC champion, especially if he chooses to vacate it later on in the year once the WBC orders him to fight Golovkin.

It seems like a waste of time for Cotto to hold onto the title if he’s not going to defend it in the traditional manner against guys from the middleweight weight division.

“We’re going to Los Angeles to fulfill certain commitments we made, and we’re also going to meet with Freddie Roach to outline the details of training camp,” said Peñagarícano. “We’re going to leave this weekend and we certainly have a lot of work to do.”

Roach, the trainer for Cotto, has already said that he’s not interested in matching Cotto against Golovkin, because he doesn’t see the Kazakhstan fighter as being a popular enough fighter to match him up against. Instead of Golovkin, Roach wants Saul “Canelo” Alvarez or Amir Khan for him. Canelo won’t be available for June though, because he’ll be recovering from his May 9th fight.

If Cotto really wants to fight Canelo, then he can wait a few months and face him in September or October if the two fighters can agree on a contract, which is hard to predict. Khan is someone that Cotto fight, but that would be a fight that would somehow cheapen the WBC middleweight belt because Khan is a welterweight. If we’re going to have champion defending their titles against fighters’ two divisions below then rather than the top contenders or champions from the weight their fighting in, it makes a mockery of the sport. Of course, it would be up to the WBC whether they would want to sanction a fight like that. They could put their foot down and say no to it, but then Cotto could always vacate the title if he really wanted to fight Khan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9nd4Li322c

In the big scheme of things it probably won’t matter if Cotto vacates the WBC title right now, because if he’s going to vacate it or have it stripped from him later this year for not fighting Golovkin, then it makes no difference if he vacates it now.

“He [Golovkin] has to wait like anybody else,” Cotto told ESPN.com. “He can do whatever he wants. My career does not depend on Gennady Golovkin. Everything I do will be the best for me. That is what I will do.”

If Cotto is serious about telling Golovkin that he has to wait for a fight against him then it’s possibly a good thing, because it suggests that there will be a fight between them at some point in the future. But where Cotto says “he can do whatever he wants,” that suggests that he’s not particularly interested in fighting Golovkin. Cotto’s comment “Everything I do will be the best for me” is kind of a useless thing to say, because everyone does what’s best for themselves. It really doesn’t need to be said. It’s like saying ‘I’m going to breath, go to the bathroom and eat.’ Big deal, tell us something we don’t know. But it doesn’t seem like Cotto is going to take any chances while he’s holding onto the WBC middleweight title. It looks like he’s going to play it safe, and hold onto the WBC title as a trinket to make him look good for the casual boxing fans. It would be like a trophy type thing. The problem is the trophy would lose meaning without Cotto fighting the best guys from the middleweight division.

“That’s [Cotto vs. Khan] a winnable fight for us,” Roach said via RingTV.com. “His speed is his greatest asset but we’d have the game plan top beat him.”

Cotto-Khan would be a much better fight than Cotto vs. the 41-year-old Bundrage, or Cotto vs. Rios or Bradley. But it’s still not a great fight given that Khan is a welterweight.



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