By Dan Ambrose: WBC middleweight title holder Miguel Cotto (39-4, 32 KOs) says his fight against former WBA/WBC 154lb champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (45-1-1, 32 KOs) is practically a reality now that Canelo has beaten James Kirkland. Cotto only has to beat former IBF/WBA middleweight champion Daniel Geale (31-3, 16 KOs) in their fight next month on June 6th, and then we could be seeing the Canelo-Cotto fight.
The Canelo vs. Cotto fight could be seen an elimination bracket where the two guys square off to face the fighter that many boxing fans see as the real middleweight champion in Gennady Golovkin (33-0, 30 KOs). However, that’s not the intentions that Canelo and his promoter Oscar De La Hoya have.
They don’t want to face 33-year-old Golovkin anytime soon, and De La Hoya is talking two years from. But in the olden days when fighters were striving to prove who the best was in each division, we’d see the winner of the Cotto-Canelo fight looking to face Golokvin to try and take his No.1 spot.
“It is a fight [Cotto-Canelo] that practically given remains to be realized. We are waiting. Already ‘Canelo’ did its job last Saturday, now it is me I do mine on June 6,” Cotto said to El Vocero de Puerto Rico via deportes.univision.com. “I go into my fight. I will do the work that Freddie [Roach] has designed for my training.”
Cotto might be making a mistake in assuming that he’s going to get past the 5’10” Geale in their fight on June 6th at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. Geale isn’t a gimpy-legged, 40-year-old coming off of a 14 month layoff and knee surgery like Cotto’s last opponent Sergio Martinez was a year ago when Cotto beat the former WBC champion by a 10th round knockout in June of 2014.
Geale isn’t past his prime, and he’s not hobbled with a bad knee. Geale also isn’t Delvin Rodriguez, a former ESPN2 regular that Cotto beat in October of 2013. Cotto’s trainer Freddie Roach thinks he’s turned his career around with his training methods, and he points to his success with Cotto’s wins over Sergio Martinez and Delvin Rodriguez. However, Cotto hasn’t faced anyone good since his loss to Austin Trout in 2012, and it’s hard to see Cotto being any better than he was when he fought Trout in 2012.
The only thing that seems to have changed is that Cotto, like Canelo, is facing lesser opposition now. Canelo got two easy wins over Alfredo Angulo and James Kirkland, and all of a sudden Canelo’s fans are saying that he’s improved from his performance in his loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. in 2013. I don’t see any improvement myself in Canelo’s abilities. The same with Cotto. He’s facing weak opposition and Roach is bragging about Cotto being rejuvenated due to his training methods. I don’t think that’s the case at all. If anything, Cotto probably isn’t as good as he was back in 2012 when he lost to Trout and Mayweather. Cotto certainly isn’t as young as he was back then. He’s about to turn 35.
Geale has a real chance of out-boxing Cotto in this fight by staying on the move, jabbing him and not giving him a stationary target that he needs for him to succeed. A loss for Cotto would really hurt the money-making ability for him and Canelo. I can see De La Hoya still making the Cotto-Canelo fight even with Cotto coming off of a loss, but I think there would be a lot less interest from the fight by the hardcore boxing fans. The casual fans would probably buy the fight because many of them wouldn’t have a clue that Cotto was beaten by Geale, but it would definitely be difficult to sell the Canelo vs. Cotto fight to the hardcore boxing fans because many of them would see the fight as little more than a money grab on Canelo and Cotto’s part.
A lot of fans don’t understand why Cotto is fighting Geale, a fighter who was chopped down in three rounds by Golovkin in July 2014. The Cotto-Geale fight doesn’t make a lot of sense given how easily Golovkin beat Geale last year. The only thing that Cotto can try to do is do a better job against Geale than Golovkin did. If Cotto fails to do that he’s going to wind up looking like a paper champion who doesn’t deserve to be the WBC middleweight title holder.
Comments are closed.