De La Hoya: Canelo-Cotto delivered an exciting night of boxing

By Boxing News - 11/22/2015 - Comments

delahoya744By Chris Williams: Promoter Oscar De La Hoya thinks that last night’s fight between his fighter Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (46-1-1, 32 KOs) and Miguel Cotto (40-5, 33 KOs) delivered a great fight to the fans compared to the disappointment of the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao fight that took place earlier this year in May in the “Fight of the Century” in Las Vegas, Nevada.

De La Hoya says that the fans were on their feet cheering the action in the Cotto-Canelo fight at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Canelo won the fight by a 12 round unanimous decision by a set of wide scores on HBO PPV.

“People were eager to see an exciting fight after the disappointment of Mayweather-Pacquiao, a lack of action,” De La Hoya said last night about the Cotto-Canelo fight. “People were eager to see a good fight, and that’s what both fighters delivered. The fans were happy and the fans were on their feet. They were cheering. It was an exciting night of boxing,” De La Hoya said.

There’s some dispute about whether the Cotto vs. Canelo fight delivered the excitement that De La Hoya speaks of. While it was a decent fight, it wasn’t a particularly exciting fight to be honest. Cotto spent much of the fight moving on the outside, jabbing and looking to keep the heavier Canelo away from him. That wasn’t an exciting fight to be. I was bored and totally disappointed. Neither of these fighters showed the skills that Mayweather displayed in his win over Pacquiao.

In the later rounds of the fight, Canelo started to show signs of fading. He looked like he began to tire out by the 9th round from having to chase Cotto around the ring. De La Hoya is kidding himself if he really believes that the Cotto-Canelo fight was better than the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao fight.

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There’s no comparison. With the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight, boxing fans got to see an artist at work in Mayweather easily beating Pacquiao. It’s not Mayweather’s fault that he was so masterful in dominating Pacquiao. But with the Cotto-Canelo fight, I was bored the entire time, and I didn’t see the card as being worth the $59.99 asking price on standard PPV on HBO. With the lack of action on the card, I think the fights were worth maybe $2 at the most.

De La Hoya had promised that the Cotto vs. Canelo fight was going to be a war from start to finish. That’s not what I saw last night. I saw Cotto running around the ring, and Canelo ducking to avoid shots. We didn’t see the come forward type fighting style that we see in Gennady Golovkin with Canelo and Cotto. Those guys fought like they didn’t want to get hit and were going to make sure at all costs that they didn’t get nailed with punches.

For me, there was really only one exciting fight on the entire career and that was the co-feature bout between Takashi Miura and Francisco Vargas. I thought that fight delivered value for the money. The Cotto-Canelo fight did not deliver value. I wasn’t impressed with the Ronny Rios vs. Jayson Velez or the Guillermo Rigondeaux vs. Drian Francisco fight.



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