By Sean McDaniel: Forget about Floyd Mayweather Jr. The fighter that Manny Pacquiao almost certainly will be fighting next is WBA light middleweight champion Miguel Cotto. It’s looking the fight between Pacquiao and Mayweather won’t get made, at least not now. And Pacquiao will be fighting in November because his promoter Bob Arum has reportedly booked both the Cowboy Stadium and MGM Grand, in Las Vegas, Nevada.
If the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight happens, then it will take place the MGM Grand. However, the Pacquiao-Cotto fight will almost definitely be taking place at the Cowboy Stadium. I think it’s bad place for that particular fight because it would be much better off taking place at Yankee Stadium, in New York, where Cotto has a lot of fans.
But Cotto will clearly be the most likely fighter that gets selected for Pacquiao to fight. It comes down to this: Pacquiao is totally into collecting titles and Cotto is the most marketable fighter at junior middleweight and he does have the title.
Pacquiao is going to ignore him and take on IBF champion Cory Spinks for a title and it’s too late to fight Sergio Martinez. And there’s no way that Pacquiao will fight the WBO champion Sergeii Dzinziruk, because he’s not well known enough in the United States yet.
Pacquiao isn’t going to skip the junior middleweight division and take on one of the middleweight champions like Felix Sturm or Martinez, even if his promoter did come up with a power draining catch weight. The junior middleweight division is the end of the line for Pacquiao.
He won’t go any further unless he’s totally obsessed with collecting titles, and I don’t think he is. But you never know. That would be just awful to see Pacquiao fighting a middleweight at a catch weight pf 154. But somehow I sort of could see it happening.
Cotto recently defeated Yuri Foreman by a 9th round stoppage on June 5th at Yankee Stadium. A lot of people think that Cotto will only defend the title once or twice, probably against Pacquiao and either Antonio Margarito or Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. Obviously, Cotto would lose a rematch with Pacquiao and lose his WBA title along with it. However, a rematch between Cotto and Margarito would be a fight where you really could predict the winner.
Cotto seems to have improved under new trainer Emanuel Steward and isn’t getting hit quite some much as he did before. Cotto probably hasn’t improved enough to beat Pacquiao, but he could be good enough to beat Margarito in a rematch.
That’s a fight that could very well happen if the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight goes down. But, like I said, I think the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao fight won’t happen because the two won’t be able to come to an agreement about the blood testing and the purse split. This would leave Cotto in the prime position to get a fight with Pacquiao again. It doesn’t matter that most boxing fans are hardly interested in seeing a rematch between those two fighters.
If Pacquiao wants to win an 8th world title, and I think he does, he’s going to go after Cotto rather than Spinks and Dzinziruk. It’s the most money and a fight that Arum can stick in the Cowboy Stadium. Because of the one-sided nature of their previous fight last November, I doubt that the Cowboy Stadium will sell more than 50,000 tickets. It’ll probably do about the same as Pacquiao vs. Joshua Clottey, which drew 50,000.
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