By Dan Ambrose: Floyd Mayweather Jr. will be moving up in weight to challenge WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto for his title on May 5th at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. The fight will be held at the full 154 pound weight for the division without a catchweight handicap for Mayweather Jr.

This shows the courage of the man, as Manny Pacquiao was adamant about not wanting to fight Cotto unless he drained down to 147lbs to fight him. Pacquiao wasn’t willing to move up in weight slightly to help make the fight happen at 150lbs, and this wiped out the Cotto-Pacquiao II rematch. But it left a great opportunity for Mayweather Jr. to slide in and face Cotto at the full weight. Mayweather Jr. isn’t afraid to fight guys over 150lbs. He’ll take whatever punishment he needs to in order to get the job done against the Puerto Rican star.

The Cotto-Mayweather Jr. fight will have Olympic style blood testing to check for performance enhancing drugs. Cotto is on board with the testing and there won’t be a cutoff date for the testing, which was something that Pacquiao previously requested when Mayweather Jr. attempted to fight him in 2010. Pacquiao’s lengthy cutoff date eventually caused the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight to go down the tubes, as Pacquiao wanted a 24 day non-testing window between the fight and Mayweather Jr. wouldn’t agree to that.

The Mayweather vs. Cotto fight is a little late in the stage for them to be fighting, as Cotto isn’t considered to be the same fighter he was back before he took a beating against Antonio Margarito in 2008 and another beating in a 12th round TKO loss to Pacquiao in 2009. Cotto has won all of his fights since the Pacquiao loss, but he’s not faced anyone truly dangerous. He’s beaten Yuri Foreman, one of Bob Arum’s Top Rank fighters without much power and a bad leg; Cotto then defeated 38-year-old Ricardo Mayorga, who was 10 years past his prime and then in his last fight he avenged his earlier loss to Margarito by beating him by a 10th round stoppage. However, Margarito hadn’t fought in a year and was coming off of three surgeries on his right eye and without a tune-up to test whether his eye would hold up under the pounding. It didn’t. Cotto was able to close it by the 8th and the fight was stopped after the 9th. We don’t really know how good Cotto is because Arum hasn’t matched him against anyone that can still fight in the past two years. We did see Cotto lose to Pacquiao and Margarito, but Arum hasn’t put him in with the best junior middleweights for some reason.