Cotto: If they want to fight with me, they got to agree to catch-weight

By Boxing News - 06/04/2015 - Comments

1-Press Conference Cotto vs Geale 12 (3)By Dan Ambrose: This Saturday’s catch-weight fight between WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (39-4, 32 KOs) and Daniel Geale (31-3, 16 KOs) appears to be only the beginning of the catch-weight fights for the 34-year-old Cotto, because he’s saying that if fighters want to face him, they need to agree to a catch-weight.

Cotto won the WBC middleweight title off of a catch-weight against former WBC champion Sergio Martinez last year in June despite the fact that Martinez was the champion. He still accommodated Cotto with a handicap. Now Cotto is continuing that trend with a 157lb catch-weight fight against Geale on Saturday.

“If they want to fight with Miguel Cotto, they get to agree with the catch-weight,” Cotto said via ESPN.com. “If not, the fight doesn’t happen.”

That’s pretty significant for Cotto to giving his opposition a ‘take it or leave’ ultimatum for them to fight him at a catch-weight or not at all. It wouldn’t seem nearly as bad if Cotto weren’t the WBC middleweight champion. If he was just a regular contender, he could certainly do what Saul “Canelo” Alvarez does in dragging his junior middleweight opponents up to 155 to fight them at catch-weights in the middleweight division due to him having problems making weight for junior middleweight. But Cotto isn’t just a contender, he’s the WBC middleweight champion.

A lot of boxing fans see the WBC belt as the No.1 belt in the middleweight division, and here we have a champion who is insisting on his opponents fight at catch-weights against him.

Where it’s going to get really interesting is to see if Cotto tries to insist on a catch-weight against his No.1 WBC mandatory challenger Gennady Golovkin. Since it’s his mandatory challenger and not just a voluntary defense, I don’t see how Cotto can get away with pushing Golovkin into fighting at a catch-weight.

It’s not as if Cotto can say ‘If you don’t agree with my catch-weight demands then you won’t get the fight’ against someone like Golovkin. If Cotto chooses to play hardball and walk away from his mandatory defense against Golovkin after his next fight, which is expected to be Canelo, the World Boxing Council will have no other choice but to strip Cotto of his WBC belt. They won’t just let Cotto walk away from his mandatory simply because he won’t give him a weight handicap that will give him an advantage. I think Golovkin is the type who would probably humor Cotto and give him a handicap catch-weight, as long as it’s not something extreme like asking him to come in at 155.

As for Geale, he’s not too worried about Cotto’s handicap against him. He figures to make the weight without it weakening him too much.
“I think that dropping me down a few pounds may weaken me a little bit, but I’m going to make sure that’s not the case,” Geale said. “And once I step into that ring, you know, it’s going to be 100 percent, ready to go.”

If Geale isn’t negatively affected by the catch-weight, he could make this a really tough fight for Cotto. He’ll have to deal with a lot of shots from Geale, and we could see Cotto’s face get puffed up and cut to ribbons like it has been in the past against guys like Manny Pacquiao, Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Antonio Margarito.



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