By Dan Ambrose: Trainer Freddie Roach is 100 percent certain that his fighter WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (39-4, 32 KOs) will beat WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (32-0, 29 KOs) if and when the two of them get around to facing each other in the future.
Roach says he’d like to train Cotto to defeat Golovkin, but he’s not the one who picks Cotto’s fights. That’s Gaby Penagaricano’s job, and unless he’s interested in making the Cotto-Golovkin fight, we probably will never get a chance to see it.
Cotto’s last two fights have come against and depleted Sergio Martinez and Delvin Rodriguez. In looking at those two fighters, it would seem that Golovkin doesn’t fit into Cotto’s plans, because he’s so dramatically different from the type of guys that Cotto is being matched up against at this late stage in his career.
“That’s up to Gaby Penagaricano; I have nothing to do with negotiations,” Roach said via RingTV.com. “I pick Miguel 100 percent to win that fight against Golovkin but I’m not part of negotiations of who he chooses. I do feel it’s a winnable fight. Gennady’s last fight, there were like 900 people there. It wasn’t that good a show; it was mediocre. Murray tried a little bit but I thought Golovkin should have ended it earlier.”
Roach is talking a lot of trash, but he’s also able to do so by him saying he’s not the guy that makes the fights for Cotto. That means that Roach can talk as much trash as he wants about Golovkin without having to worry about boxing fans pushing him hard to put the fight together between Cotto and Golovkin. It’s easy for Roach to take, but it means nothing unless he’s prepared to talk to Penagaricano to make the fight happen.
Cotto and Penagaricano are said to be considering the following fighters for Cotto’s next fight: 41-year-old Cornelius “K-9” Bundrage, Brandon Rios and Tim Bradley. Whichever guy gets picked out, he’ll be expected to move up to middleweight to take the fight, but at a likely catch-weight. None of those fighters are big names, and none of them would bring in a huge amount of traffic for a pay-per-view fight.
If Cotto chooses to fight one of them rather than Golovkin, then it’s going to take away the excuse for not fighting Golovkin. In the past, Golokvin was dismissed as a potential opponent for Cotto, because he wasn’t a big name and he didn’t bring in a lot of fan interest. But if Cotto and Penagaricano select Bundrage, Rios or Bradley, then it’s going to look like Cotto is flat out ducking the Golovkin fight, because none of them are big names.
The whole idea of ducking will be proven to be academic later on this year if Cotto chooses to vacate his WBC 160 pound title rather than defending it against his mandatory challenger Golovkin.
The World Boxing Council has already ordered that the winner of Cotto’s next fight will then have to fight Golovkin later this year. If Cotto chooses to vacate or let the WBC strip him of his title rather than fighting Golovkin, it’s going to look really bad for Cotto.
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