Cotto’s catch-weight will make it difficult for him to get credit if he beats Geale

By Boxing News - 06/03/2015 - Comments

1-Press Conference Cotto vs Geale 19 (2)By Dan Ambrose: I’m not sure if WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (39-4, 32 KOs) realizes it or not but he put himself in a bad position by electing to fight No.6 WBC challenger Daniel Geale (31-3, 16 KOs) at a catch-weight of 157 pounds on Saturday night rather than taking the fight at the full weight for the division.

It obviously looks bad for a world champion to be insisting that his opponent fight him at a catch-weight in order for him to get a word title fight. Fans want to see things done fairly, and it looks bad that Cotto is electing to drain his opponent Geale for the fight instead of letting him come in at the full weight for the division.

Cotto says he chose to use a catch-weight because he’s a small fighter, and he wants things to be fair. But the argument fans have is if Cotto doesn’t feel that he has the size to fight guys in the middleweight division, then he should move back down to junior middleweight so he doesn’t have to drain his opponents. The way Cotto is doing is he’s artificially creating a weight class inside the middleweight division that is apart from the class.

By saying your opponent can weight in no higher than 157, Cotto has artificially created a weight class, and the World Boxing Council has sat back and blindly let it occur. If you have a champion who tells his opponents that they can’t weight in over a certain amount, it sets things up to where the champion has an unfair advantage. If they’re too small for the division, then they shouldn’t be fighting in the division.

“I think the people make a lot of issue with that,” Cotto said via ESPN.com “I have been in a catch-weight in my career [in the past]. It was nothing. I just agreed to do it and I did it in my career. I’m not a 160-pounder and I just want to make the game more fair.”

This catch-weight business looks bad when it’s done with a world title at stake, and it looks even worse when it’s the world champion that is insisting that it be done. Where does it end? Getting an advantage over your opponent to drain him down in an attempt to make him smaller and/or weaker, it just looks bad. It’s the smaller fighters that do this kind of thing.

We’ve seen Manny Pacquiao use catch-weights in the past against Cotto and Antonio Margarito. In both cases, Pacquiao won world titles off of catch-weights.

Pacquiao’s fight against Oscar De La Hoya wasn’t a catch-weight, but Pacquiao did get De La Hoya to drain down from 154 to fight at 147, and it left De La Hoya too weak to put up much of a fight. I guess that’s the ideal situation for the smaller fighter when he gets the bigger guy to weaken to the point where they can win simply by walking out into the ring against the weight drained fighter.

Cotto’s trainer Freddie Roach was asked this week what weight Gennady Golovkin would have to drain down to in order to fight Cotto, and Roach didn’t want to touch that question. But you have to figure that if Geale is being asked to drain to 157, Golovkin may have to come down in weight as well. The thing is Golovkin doesn’t rehydrate any more than Geale does after he makes weight, so there’s no point in having Golovkin drain all the way down to 155 or even 154 to face Cotto.

I don’t think Golovkin would accept 154 for a fight against Cotto because he wants to capture his WBC middleweight title. He’s not going to let Cotto make it a non-title fight like we saw recently with Danny Garcia and Lamont Peterson fighting in a non-title fight just so that Garcia’s titles wouldn’t be on the line. Golovkin has made it perfectly clear that he wants to fight for Cotto’s WBC middleweight title, so he’s not going to go for 154. But it’ll look really bad if Cotto asks Golovkin to fight at a catch-weight of 155 for the WBC 160 pound title. Cotto can do that, but I don’t know that Golovkin will agree to it.

“Boxing is my business. It’s the way I solidify my family’s future.” Cotto said. “Every person who has been involved in boxing and doesn’t look at boxing this way, they have a wrong point of view of boxing.”



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