By Allan Fox: It looks like former four division world champion Miguel Cotto (40-5, 33 KOs) is expected to be back inside the ring in the next four months on June 18th against an opponent still to be determined. According to Dan Rafael, 42-year-old Mexican warrior Juan Manuel Marquez is a potential opponent for Cotto.
However, it could also wind up being someone else because Marquez is talking about wanting a tune-up fight in his next fight. The location of Cotto’s fight is still unknown as well. New York is a potential location. That location makes the most sense because of Cotto’s large fan base in the city.
Cotto, 35, lost his last fight to Saul “Canelo” Alvarez last November in a close 12 round unanimous decision ast the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Cotto lost his WBC middleweight title in the fight. Cotto likely would have beaten Canelo if the two fighters were the same size, but Canelo looked like he had a large weight advantage of approximately 20 pounds. Their fight brought in 900,000 pay-per-view buys on HBO pay-per-view. It was a definite success and the second biggest pay-per-view fight of the year behind the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao fight.
Cotto needs to stay busy winning fights until he gets a rematch against Canelo. The two of them will likely face each other again because there’s too much money in a rematch. Canelo’s promoter Oscar De La Hoya of Golden Boy Promotions would jump at the chance to match him back up with Canelo in 2017 or possibly even this year if he doesn’t fight Gennady Golovkin. Canelo will need a big name to fight in September if the Golovkin fight doesn’t take place, and Cotto would be the perfect fight.
Cotto is a good fighter, but he’s likely going to be carefully matched with the little time that he has left in his career. You’re probably not going to see Cotto fighting the other top middleweights or the top junior middleweights. He’s going to looking to fight the stars like Canelo and Marquez. That’s about it. We’re not likely going to see Cotto get in the ring with Golovkin because that would be too much of a mismatch. Fighting welterweights might be one way that Cotto could extend his career longer because he would match up with a lot of the top fighters in the division. The only question is can Cotto could the 147lb division. If not, then he would need to drag up the top welterweights to junior middleweight to fight them at catch-weights.
Despite his close 12 round decision loss to Canelo, Cotto still has the talent to beat a lot of top fighters in the 160lb division. The only thing that would hold him back is the money. There’s not going to be a lot of money for Cotto to fight the likes of Billy Joe Saunders, Peter Quillin and Daniel Jacobs. Those would be risky fights for Cotto, but he might be able to beat them. But if the money isn’t there, then he’s probably not going to take the risk.
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