By Dan Ambrose:
By Dan Ambrose: Despite this Saturday’s fight on HBO being considered a mismatch by a lot of boxing experts, WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (39-4, 32 Kos) reportedly has a rematch clause in his contract in his fight against Australian Daniel Geale (31-3, 16 KOs) at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.
Cotto is a big favorite to win this fight, but if Geale somehow pulls off a big upset, we’ll likely see the two fighters doing it again later this year so that Cotto can try and avenge his loss and move forward to take his big money PPV fight against Saul “Canelo” Alvarez in 2016.
The Cotto-Geale fight will take place at a catch-weight of 157 pounds rather than the normal weight limit of 160. Cotto wanted the catch-weight, and Geale agreed on it. He’s complaining about it, but he signed on for it. The only person Geale can blame is himself for saying yes to the weight requirement, but if he did that he probably wouldn’t have gotten the fight.
“Gary Shaw tells me that Cotto has a rematch clause for Geale, in case the Aussie pulls the upset #boxing,” Steve Kim said on his twitter.
Geale is said to be in the mid-160s with his weight right now, and he’ll need to drop another eight or so pounds by the time of the weigh-in on Friday. If Geale doesn’t make weight, Cotto will get a portion of his purse. Depending on how heavy Geale come in, he’d still have a chance of winning Cotto’s WBC middleweight title, as long as Cotto doesn’t cancel the fight altogether.
With so many fighters asking for catch-weight handicaps for their fights, it might be in the best interest of the sanctioning bodies to either create more divisions to erase the need for catch-weights, or make them illegal. I think the sanctioning bodies would likely jump at the chance of creating new weight divisions like 144, 150, 156, 164 and 180. It would create more champions, and of course more money for the sanctioning bodies. But it likely wouldn’t stop fighters from still choosing to fight at catch-weights unfortunately.
Take for example someone like Canelo. He’s made a new home for himself at 155, which is one pound over the junior middleweight limit. If the sanctioning bodies created a new division at 156, I could still see Canelo coming in at 155 for his fights against junior middleweights rather than simply abandoning the idea of fighting at 155.
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