By Dan Ambrose: WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (37-2, 30 KO’s) will have to quickly solve the Floyd Mayweather Jr. (42-0, 26 KO’s) puzzle on May 5th before the house comes crumbling down on Cotto with his skin breaking down, and blood flowing everywhere.
If Cotto hasn’t come up with the perfect answer for the Mayweather riddle by say the 3rd round, Cotto is going to be reduced to a bloody mess by Mayweather very quickly. If you think the beating that Manny Pacquiao gave Cotto in their catchweight championship handicap bout in 2009, it’ll be much worse than that as Mayweather gives Cotto a pounding.
Cotto’s new trainer Pedro Diaz supposedly has been studying Mayweather’s style and has come up with the answer for his fighter. We’ll see next month if that’s true, but it’s going to have to be a perfect game plan for Cotto to have any kind of success. Diaz came up with a good plan for Cotto to defeat Antonio Margarito in their rematch last December, but the game plan wasn’t that hard to come up with because Shane Mosley had already created the blueprint in how to beat Margarito. And much of the work was done for Cotto by Margarito’s bad right eye, which had been recently surgically operated on several times. All Cotto had to do was stick a jab in the face of Margarito and his bad right eye did the rest of the work for Cotto by swelling up completely.
Cotto has looked terrible in his training with Diaz with his bent over fighting and with Cotto squaring up in front of Diaz the way that he used to. Emanuel Steward obviously didn’t rid Cotto of all of his bad habits because he’s still fighting the way he did before Steward took over temporarily as Cotto’s trainer. All the bad habits are back now that Steward is out of the picture, and Diaz seems to be letting Cotto continue with them. I don’t know, but maybe it might not matter anyway. I mean, even if Cotto fights with the most perfect form, he’s still Cotto and won’t have the speed, defense of the skin to stand up to a fighter like Mayweather for long. That’s why it’s imperative that Cotto go all out to try and get a quick stoppage before Mayweather has had time to come up with a game plan to beat him. Cotto has got to see the fight like Mayweather’s bout against Shane Mosley where Mayweather was hurt by a big shot early before he was properly warmed up. Cotto can do the same if he starts fast. It might be his only chance.
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