By Chris Williams: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum has his ace in the hole, WBA light middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (35-2, 28 KO’s), raring to go in case the negotiations between World Boxing Organization welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao and unbeaten Floyd Mayweather Jr. don’t pan out. Arum will substitute Cotto in place of Mayweather in a second, and then put the fight in the Cowboy Stadium in Texas, which Arum has already reserved for the occasion well ahead of time. Antonio Margarito, another one of Arum’s fighters, is also an option for Pacquiao, although not quite as appealing because Margarito doesn’t have a boxing license to fight in the United States at this time.
Pacquiao wants a chance at winning an 8th world title, and Cotto, with the WBA junior middleweight title he recently won over another one of Arum’s fighters Yuri Foreman, it would give Pacquiao the perfect excuse to go after Cotto to try and make history. Boxing fans likely don’t give a hoot whether Pacquiao captures yet another title. All they want to do is see him fight, preferably against someone he didn’t just beat like Cotto.
Arum is going to have to use some clever marketing to make the Cotto-Pacquiao rematch appealing to the general boxing public, because they’re the ones that are going to have to pay $49.95 to see what will likely be another terrible mismatch. Cotto looked way out of his class in the fight with Pacquiao last November, and Cotto’s recent win over Foreman didn’t show that Cotto had improved enough to beat a fighter like Pacquiao.
Cotto was getting lit up by the light hitting Foreman until he injured his right knee in the 7th round. To be sure, Cotto was throwing more jabs in the fight than he usually does and he has his new trainer Emanuel Steward to thank for that. However, Cotto isn’t going to be a fighter like Pacquiao with jabs. He’s going to have to show some better skills than that, and I didn’t see those skills on display in his fight with Foreman.
Like usual, Cotto was getting an awful lot up until the 7th when Foreman’s leg gave out. Cotto had control over the fight, but he was still taking heavy shots every once in awhile from a fighter that’s not known for his power or his work rate. Arum might do well if he was to sell a Cotto-Pacquiao rematch at half price for fans, since most of them already saw the first mismatch and to make it more appealing, Arum could reduce the price by one half so that boxing fans don’t feel they’re walking into a bad deal.
I think half price would interest me in watching the card, but only if they put a good competitive undercard along with it. I don’t want see mismatches between Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. and B level fighters in Arum’s stable. If he must put Chavez on the card, I want to see him face real fighters like Alfredo Angulo, Kermit Cintron, Margarito, Sergeii Dzinziruk, Sergio Martinez or Gennady Golovkin, not B level guys that he can crow about beating afterwards.
A match between Chavez Jr. and any of those fighters would make a second fight between Cotto and Pacquiao well worth it, as long as they sell the card for half price. I have no interest in paying $50 to watch Pacquiao destroy a fighter [Cotto] he just finished destroying. Ideally, I’d like to see Pacquiao fight someone other than Cotto or Margarito. That’s not even interesting. I’d like to see Pacquiao against Sergio Martinez, Paul Williams or James Kirkland. Forget about a rematch with Cotto. Already saw that one and don’t want to see it again. That’s like retaking a class that you already got an ‘A’ in.
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