Sulaiman confident Cotto-Canelo will reach agreement, Golovkin to fight winner

By Boxing News - 06/15/2015 - Comments

cotto1111By Dan Ambrose: Despite the recent comments from Saul “Canelo” Alvarez’s manager Eddy Reynoso about them having a plan-B and C if WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (40-4, 33 KOs) fails to agree to fight the 24-year-old Canelo on the Mexican holiday on September 12th, World Boxing Council President Mauricio Sulaiman feels confident that Cotto and Canelo will reach an agreement for a mega-fight this year, with the winner then facing WBC interim middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin in 2016.

“Cotto vs. Canelo is one of the match up combinations that many fans want to see,” Sulaiman said via wbcboxing.com. “I think both sides will soon reach an agreement, after Interim champion, Gennady Golovkin, accepted this situation.”

To be sure, Golovkin’s promoter Tom Loeffler is only good with letting the Cotto-Canelo fight go ahead if the winner of the fight will agree to fight Golovkin next year. That’s going to be tough to guarantee though because the winner of the Cotto vs. Canelo fight can always vacate the WBC middleweight title, and there’s nothing that the WBC or anyone could do about it.

It’s obvious that if the winner of the Cotto-Canelo fight fails to face Golovkin next, then they’ll be stripped of their WBC middleweight title. That goes without saying because Cotto was already supposed to be fighting Golovkin next instead of Canelo.

The only reason this fight has a chance of taking place with the WBC title on the line is because Golovkin and Loeffler aren’t averse to the bout taking place as long as the winner faces Golovkin. That’s the difficult part because the WBC can’t guarantee that Cotto or Canelo won’t simply vacate the WBC title rather than getting in the ring with Golovkin and getting potentially embarrassed by him by getting knocked out.

“Cotto looked amazing in his last bout and “Canelo” looked really accurate. It could be a great event, with Golovkin then fighting the winner next year,” Sulaiman said.

Cotto destroyed 34-year-old Daniel Geale in four rounds on June 6th of this month in a catch-weight fight at 157 pounds. It was a fight that really didn’t need a catch-weight because Geale isn’t a huge puncher, and he’d recently been knocked out in 3 rounds by Golovkin last year. Cotto made himself look bad by insisting on a catch-weight handicap for the fight instead of just doing what a champion is supposed to do in defending his title at the full 160 pound weight for the division.

Canelo looked almost as bad in choosing the ring rusty James Kirkland to beat on May 9th last month in scoring a 3rd round knockout. Kirkland hadn’t fought in a year and a half, and had put on a lot of weight before being selected for the Canelo fight. Boxing fans wondered why Canelo wasn’t matched up against a relevant younger junior middleweight like the Charlo brothers or Demetrius Andrade instead of being put in with a name from the past, who hadn’t fought in a year and a half and who had knocked out in just one round by Nobuhiro Ishida in 2011.



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