By Dave Lahr: Only one fight removed from a horrible beating at the hands of Antonio Margarito in July 2008, World Boxing Organization welterweight champion Miguel Cotto (33-1, 27 KOs) steps back in the ring on June 13th against Joshua Clottey (35-2, 20 KOs) at Madison Square Garden, in New York, New York.

Cotto, 27, wants to put the loss to Margarito behind him and make people forget about the defeat, hence the choice of the tough Clottey as his opponent for June 13th. It’s a great choice because this is an opponent that will definitely give Cotto a good gauge of where he’s at as a fighter and whether he’s recovered fully from his beating that he suffered at the hands of Margarito.

Clottey is a little different from some of the fighters that Cotto has faced in the past few years. Unlike opponents like Paulie Malignaggi, Carlos Quintana, Zab Judah, Alfonso Gomez and Michael Jennings, Cotto isn’t going to just be able to go out and steamroll over Clottey.

If Cotto tries that, he may end up getting rocked early and knocked out by one of Clottey’s fast shots. Clottey can take punishment to the head and body, and doesn’t get broken down and knocked out. This would probably be the wrong opponent for Cotto to go right after try to take apart in the early going, because Clottey has faster hands and power on the same level of Margarito.

I think Cotto is the harder puncher, but not by a whole lot. But it doesn’t matter whether Cotto can hit harder. The difference is Clottey has a great chin and Cotto doesn’t. Cotto has been hurt and dropped by DeMarcus Corley, Ricardo Torres and Margarito. Also, Cotto has been hurt in fights with Judah and Randall Bailey.

That’s five fights that Cotto has been hurt in, which seems to suggest that there’s a chin problem there. With the severe beating that Cotto took in his fight with Margarito last year, it couldn’t have improved his ability to absorb punishment any.

This begs the question whether Cotto is still the same fighter he was prior to his loss to Margarito. We learned nothing from Cotto’s recent fight against a badly over-matched Michael Jennings, who Cotto easily defeated by a 5th round TKO in February.

The one thing that we learned in the fight is that Jennings had no business being ranked as high as he was and perhaps belonged in the 2nd tier of welterweights rather than ranked in the top 15. He hadn’t beaten anyone for him to deserve to be ranked as high as he was in the fight.

Whether people admit this or not, Cotto is kind of a Ricky Hatton type fighter, a brawler that gets hit a lot cleanly in his fights. It didn’t matter so much before because Cotto was able to take the shots, despite getting hurt frequently.

However, it seems as if the accumulation of punishment might start to be showing their effects on Cotto with the beating he took by Margarito. With his power, Cotto will be able to knockout a lot of his opponents before they can test his chin.

That won’t be the case against Clottey on June 13th and I think Cotto may have some problems in the fight. I think he probably will still win, but I’m not so certain about that anymore because of knockout loss to Margarito.