By Dan Ambrose: Floyd Mayweather Jr. (42-0, 26 KO’s) has picked the exact right moment to get a fight against WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (37-2, 30 KO’s) in their fight on May 5th. Cotto has been slipping for a long, long time and his ex-promoter Bob Arum doesn’t seem to have been putting him in with anyone relevant in the game since Arum tried matching Cotto with Manny Pacquiao in 2009. The results of that fight was disastrous for Cotto with him getting hammered for 12 rounds and taken out.
It’s been all soft diet for Cotto since then with him being put in with a fighter with one good leg and no power in WBA junior middleweight champion Yuri Foreman, an old 38-year-old Ricardo Mayorga and then Antonio Margarito coming off of three eye surgeries on his right eye. Cotto didn’t even look good in any of those fights even with the guys that were less at their best.
Cotto in his prime was a pretty decent fighter before his fight against Margarito in 2008. But since that fight, Cotto hasn’t looked the same and is very beatable now, especially against a fighter in the class of Mayweather. Cotto’s game is like a V-8 automobile that’s badly in need of a tune-up. He’s not firing on all cylinders and putting out a lot of black smoke from his exhaust pipe out the back end. He needs to be rebuilt but in boxing you can’t rebuild a fighter that’s been through the kinds of wars that Cotto has.
Maybe Arum had it right by putting Cotto in with old guys, and fighters with some kind of physical affliction limiting them in some way to make them more betable. Mayweather obviously didn’t choose Cotto because he’s showing signs of fading as a fighter, but rather Cotto was chosen because he’s a big name and can bring in huge money on pay per view.
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