By Dan Ambrose: If trainer Freddie Roach is going to be the one that makes the decision on who WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (39-4, 32 KOs) fights next, it’s not going to be WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin.
Roach doesn’t like that fight. He still thinks Golovkin doesn’t bring much to the table, and he says that his last fight against Martin Murray drew only 900 people last February in Monte Carlo.
If the decision falls on Roach, and it likely will, he says he would prefer to see Cotto fight Amir Khan or Saul “Canelo” Alvarez next.
“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.”
This would be a controversial move by Cotto to defend his WBC 160 pound title against a welterweight instead of middleweight, but it appears that Cotto is thinking in terms of business and not in terms of the actual sporting side of it.
A Cotto-Khan fight would likely bring in good numbers in the UK in pay-per-view. It’s debatable what kind of PPV numbers a fight between Cotto and Golovkin would do in the United States. It might not bring in more than 300,000 PPV buys, if that.
A Cotto-Khan fight would likely do similar numbers, but the difference is there would be UK PPV money that Cotto could dip his hands into to help his bottom line. But the biggest thing that Cotto would have in his favor with a Khan fight rather than a fight against Golovkin is that the Khan fight is actually one that Cotto can win.
It’s hard to picture the 5’7” Cotto beating Golovkin due to his short height and his poor defensive skills. Golovkin would have no problems nailing Cotto with his power shots all night long, and he’d likely make a mess of his face the same way Antonio Margarito did in his first fight with Cotto.
“There might have been 900 people in the room, fighting in Morocco or whatever,” Roach said via RingTV.com. “Who the heck is booking this guy? If there’s no money in such a high-risk fight? The fight I like the best for us [Cotto] is versus Canelo Alvarez. The fans would love that fight.”
Cotto wants to fight in June in New York, so there’s no chance at all that he’ll be able to fight Canelo Alvarez at that time. Canelo has a fight scheduled against James Kirkland on May 9th in Houston, Texas.
Canelo likely won’t be fighting next until the end of the year. Canelo has talked about wanting to fight three times a year on HBO, but obviously that’s not going to be happening. He’ll be lucky if he fights twice depending on whether he winds up injured from the Kirkland fight.
Cotto doesn’t have to ever fight Golovkin, but what he will have to do is give the WBC middleweight title. That part of his career as the WBC middleweight title holder will be over if he doesn’t face Golovkin, which few boxing fans expect him to do.
At the end of the day, Cotto accomplished very little in moving up in weight to win his fourth division world title, because he picked the wrong time to face Sergio Martinez to capture that belt. Cotto picked the fight at the end of Martinez’s career when he was 39, coming off of two surgeries on his right knee, and a 14 month layoff.
Cotto didn’t get much credit for the win in the minds of the hardcore boxing fans. The casual fans probably don’t care much who Cotto fought. They just wanted to see him fight and beat someone.
It probably didn’t even sink in that Cotto won the WBC middleweight title in beating Martinez. For Cotto to have impressed the knowledgeable boxing fans, he would have had to face Golovkin for the WBA title, and he obviously didn’t do that for some reason.
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