By Dan Ambrose: It looks like WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (39-4, 32 KOs) wasn’t ready for the questions he was getting about when and why he’s not fighting his #1 WBC mandatory challenger Gennady Golovkin when Cotto met with the media this week ahead of his fight on June 6th against #6 WBC Daniel Geale (31-3, 16 KOs) at the Barclays Arena in Brooklyn, New York.
Instead of the media asking Cotto harmless questions about his match-up with the 34-year-old Geale, they kept pouring in question after question related to Golovkin. Cotto is now realizing that he can escape those questions when he’s at home, but when he’s outdoors and meeting with the media, people want to know when he’s going to face Golovkin.
“I don’t have any pressure on me. I’m always going to do what’s best for my career, and what’s best for me,” Cotto told Fighthype. “I don’t care and I don’t think about what people say about my career. The only person that dictates what happens in my career is me.”
I’d have to say that Cotto not come across well in the interviews, and I’m sure he wishes that Golovkin was fighting in another weight division than him. Of course, Cotto could make the Golovkin talk go away if he vacates his WBC middleweight title and let him claim the belt after he beats the likes of Jorge Sebastian Heiland or Tureano Johnson. But at this point, Cotto is likely going to receive pressure to fight Golovkin even if he moves back down to 154.
The genie is already out of the bottle, and people are going to talk about why Cotto isn’t taking the fight with Golovkin no matter what Cotto does. Cotto can hide in a cave on top of a large mountain and the fans will still be there waiting for when he emerges to forage for food. They want Cotto to fight Golovkin, and the longer Cotto waits the worse it is for him. He’s just getting older and putting off the inevitable.
When asked if he was concerned about trying to stop Geale quicker than Golovkin did, Cotto said “No, its two different fights. Golvokin has his own style. I have my own.”
Cotto might not want to compare his fight with Geale with that of Golovkin, who destroyed Geale in just three rounds last year, but fans are definitely going to be comparing the two. If Cotto doesn’t blow Geale away in three rounds or less, many more boxing fans are going to see Cotto as an imposter and not the real WBC middleweight champion.
Right now, Cotto is technically the WBC 160lb champion after he beat up an aging and badly hobbled Sergio Martinez last year in June. But that wasn’t against a prime fighter that Cotto won the title against, and Golovkin has suddenly emerged as the guy that a lot of fans are focused on as the real WBC middleweight champion. Golovkin captured the WBC interim middleweight title last year after chopping down Marco Antonio Rubio in two rounds last October. Rubio isn’t a bad fighter, yet Golovkin trounced him in two rounds.
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