Canelo wants Cotto fight in Texas, not Las Vegas, NV

By Boxing News - 06/24/2015 - Comments

canelo681588By Dan Ambrose: Former WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (45-1-1, 32 KOs) reportedly wants his fight against WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (40-4, 33 KOs) to take place in Texas, where he’s got a tremendous following, rather than in Las Vegas, Nevada, according to Steve Kim.

The only way the 24-year-old Canelo is going to be able to get his fight against Cotto to take place in Texas is if the Puerto Rican star agrees to it. In other words, Canelo doesn’t have the negotiating muscle to force the venue on Cotto. If Canelo was negotiating with his past opponents Austin Trout, Erislandy Lara and Alfredo Angulo, he could tell them the fight was going to need to take place in Texas, and if they didn’t grant him his wish, he would just move on and find someone who would give him the green light.

“I’ve been told this and I believe it to be true, Canelo is not a fan of the MGM Grand. He wants Texas. But it takes 2 to tango #boxing,” Steve Kim said on his Twitter.

The MGM Grand is a smaller venue of only 16,800 seats compared to at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas, which seats 30,000. Canelo obviously wants the fight with Cotto to take place in front of a huge crowd in a stadium, and the best place for that to happen is if the fight is staged in Texas. However, it’s unlikely that Cotto vs. Canelo could sell out a large stadium unless the tickets were sold at a cheaper price than tickets at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. I doubt that the 30,000 fans would want to pay the costly ticket prices that a fight at the MGM Grand would cost. Many of Canelo’s tickets for his previous fights in Texas have sold at the cheaper prices in order to fill the stadium. We saw this in his fight against Trout, as well as Canelo’s fight against James Kirkland in Houston, Texas.

Cotto is probably not going to be too excited at fighting in front of a pro-Canelo fight in Texas. There’s no advantage for Cotto to be fighting in front of such a hostile crowd. If there was a lot more money in a fight in that state, then it might be worthwhile for him, but I don’t think there would be enough of a positive for him to want to fight Canelo in that state.

Nevada is a neutral state as far as the Cotto-Canelo fight goes. There will be fans of both fighters that would attend in big numbers. If they stage the fight in New York, then most of the fans will naturally be rooting for Cotto to win, because there is a large Puerto Rican fan base in the New York area. If they fight in Texas, then the fans will be predominately fans of Canelo. But having the fight staged in Nevada is the perfect place for it to take place. They obviously can’t stage the fight in the middle of the U.S, because they won’t draw a lot of fans. It’s got to be in areas where they can attract the fans of these two fighters.



Comments are closed.