Cotto-Canelo generates 13th highest gate in Vegas history

By Boxing News - 12/10/2015 - Comments

1-cotto-canelo-results (10)By Dan Ambrose: If Golden Boy Promotions CEO Oscar De La Hoya was looking for a reason to push a rematch between his golden goose Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (46-1-1, 32 KOs) and Miguel Cotto (40-5, 33 KOs) onto the boxing public, I think he may have found a reason. The figures released for the fight probably has De La Hoya licking his chops at the idea of putting together a Canelo-Cotto rematch.

According to Dan Rafael, the gate figures were released today with the Cotto-Canelo fight generating $12,470,200 from the 10,198 tickets that were sold for the fight at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The gate for the fight ranks at the 13th highest in the history of Las Vegas. Surprisingly, the Cotto vs. Canelo gate beat the game for the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Cotto fight in 2012, which brought in $12,000,140.

The Cotto-Canelo fight brought in 900,000 pay-per-view buys on HBO PPV. While those numbers were very good compared to the 150,000 PPV buys the Gennady Golovkin vs. David Lemieux fight brought in last October on HBO PPV, they were still far below the ambitious 2.4 million that De La Hoya was predicting the Cotto-Canelo fight would haul in. De La Hoya thought that if boxing fans were willing to purchase the Mayweather Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao in high numbers, then fans would want to purchase the Cotto-Canelo fight.

The fans probably would have gladly purchased the Cotto vs. Canelo fight on HBO if the fight was priced correctly at $25 to $39. I think the fight would have sold if it was pried that low, but instead it went for over $60.

Canelo beat Cotto by a 12 round unanimous decision by the controversial scores of 118-110, 119-1109 and 117-111. There wasn’t too much controversy about the results of the fight. Most boxing fans felt that Canelo had done enough to deserve the victory. However, where fans and sports writers did disagree was how wide the scores were in favor of Canelo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnChU_gwLLI

Most people felt the fight was a lot closer than the wide scores that the three judges handed down. I personally had Canelo winning by two rounds. I think Cotto would have won the fight had he boxed more in the last four rounds of the contest, because he had Canelo looked befuddled when he was using his jab and moving around the ring.

It’s still unclear right now whether Canelo will face Golovkin next of if the WBC will allow Canelo to take a voluntary defense before defending his WBC middleweight title against Golovkin, if he ever does. If the WBC lets Canelo bypass the Golovkin fight, then don’t be surprised if De La Hoya looks to setup an immediate rematch between Canelo and Cotto. There was already rematch language written in the contract for their fight last month. The only problem is I’m not sure that the boxing public will be interested in seeing a second Cotto vs. Canelo fight immediately. I guess the 900K PPV buys is reason enough for Golden Boy to push for a second fight between Canelo and Cotto.

Cotto would have a good chance of beating Canelo in the rematch if he could get him to agree to a rehydration limit that keeps him from rehydrating to more than 165. If you could keep Canelo from rehydrating to the 180s, I think Cotto wins the fight hands down. Cotto is the better fighter pound for pound in my view. I think the only reason Canelo won last time was because he had a huge weight advantage. Canelo looked like a light heavyweight/cruiserweight in the ring compared to the middleweight-sized Cotto.



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