Cotto thinks Canelo was smart to vacate WBC title

By Boxing News - 06/02/2016 - Comments

Image: Cotto thinks Canelo was smart to vacate WBC title

By Dan Ambrose: Former four division world champion Miguel Cotto is completely in favor of Mexican star Saul “Canelo” Alvarez giving up his WBC middleweight belt after being given pressure by the World Boxing Council to work under a deadline for his negotiations with his mandatory challenger Gennady “GGG” Golovkin.

Cotto brings up how he refused to pay the WBC a sanctioning fee of $300,000 after he’d paid Golovkin $800,000 in a step aside fee so that he could fight Canelo rather than him last November. Cotto didn’t like the idea of having to pay the WBC too after he’d already given Golovkin 800K.

Of course, if Cotto hadn’t given Golovkin that money, he would have had to either face him or give up the title. Cotto would have likely had a hard time against Golovkin, and he might have been knocked out or badly pounded in a one-sided 12 round decision loss. It was Cotto’s choice to go in what some boxing fans argue was the path of least resistance in taking on Canelo instead of simply facing his WBC mandatory challenger Golovkin.

What Cotto doesn’t say is that Canelo’s reasons for vacating his WBC title was a completely different reason for his own issues with the WBC. Canelo vacated the WBC title for business reasons. Cotto chose not to pay the WBC the $300K sanctioning fee because they’d already paid $800K in a step aside fee.

In the view of a lot of boxing fans, Canelo gave up the WBC title just so that he wouldn’t be forced to fight Golovkin and potentially lose to him. There’s also the belief by fans that Canelo gave up the WBC belt because he would have wound up needing to potentially give Golovkin a bigger cut of the revenue for the fight. He also wouldn’t be able to give Golovkin a take it or leave it catch-weight offer of telling him that if he wants the fight, he would have to fight him at 155lbs. Champions can’t force mandatory challengers to fight them at a catch-weight. They can ask them to fight them at a catch-weight, but if they refuse, then they must fight them at the full weight for the division.

“Canelo is an intelligent person and his (recent) action says a lot about him. I did the same for our fight in November under the same pressures, and he did it now in a very intelligent way,” Cotto said to El Vocero. “He [WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman] would have understood our position to save $1.1 million because we had already paid $800 thousand to Golovkin. Because of the WBC’s greed, they washed their hands as to the ‘step aside’ that we paid Golovkin…but then they wanted charge a [sanctioning fee] when we had already paid $800 thousand.”

It’s a smart move by Canelo not to take the fight with Golovkin if you look at it in terms of him avoiding a potential knockout loss, and being in the position to get a bigger slice of the financial pie when/if they do ever negotiate a fight. It’s probably still not going to work out well for Canelo if he doesn’t make the fight happen soon, because it makes him look like he ducked the Kazakhstan fighter.

It’ll look doubly bad if Canelo moves down to 154 and starts facing guys like WBO junior middleweight champion Liam Smith rather than the perceived better fighters in the division like the Charlo brothers and Erislandy Lara. Liam Smith said this week that he’s already been offered the fight with Canelo. Why would Canelo choose Liam Smith when he’s not seen as among the top three fighters in the 154lb division?

I don’t think it’s a smart move for Canelo to have vacated his WBC title because it makes him look bad in the eyes of the knowledgeable boxing fans. If rising 24-year-old Mexican star Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramirez faces Golovkin in early 2017 like what’s being talked about, it’s going to make Ramirez look bold and it’ll help his career. If the media is reminding fans that Canelo chose not to fight Golovkin, it could hurt Canelo and help Ramirez. Ramirez’s star will rise and we may see Canelo going downhill and being seen as a fighter on the margins.