By Dan Ambrose: Golden Boy Promotions CEO Richard Schaefer is giving 33-year-old Miguel Cotto (38-4, 31 KO’s) another week to decide whether he’ll accept the $10 million+ offer that he made to him to face former WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (42-1-1, 30 KO’s) in March or not.
If Cotto doesn’t get back to him by then, Schaefer will move on and look to match Canelo against either IBF 154 lb. champion Carlos Molina or the winner of this Saturday’s fight between Austin Trout and Erislandy Lara.
Cotto reportedly was given a big money offer by Top Rank for him to fight WBC middleweight champion Sergio Martinez (51-2-2, 28 KO’s) on June 7th at Madison Square Garden, in New York, New York. Cotto might end up taking that fight rather than facing Canelo.
Schaefer said to RingTV “I’m waiting on Cotto probably for another week. Obviously, Carlos Molina for the IBF title is one of them.”
It looks like Cotto wants to fight the 38-year-old Sergio Martinez for his WBC 160 lb. title rather than face Canelo, who doesn’t have a title and who is coming off of a loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. There are reports that Cotto was given a $15 million offer to fight Sergio, which sounds crazy because there’s little chance that the fight would bring in enough pay-per-view buys to give Cotto that kind of money and whatever money that Sergio would be asking for. That would be a lot of money to pay to Cotto for a fight that might not even break 400,000 buys.
Cotto, a former three division world champion, wants to capture a fourth division world title, and Sergio gives him the opportunity to do that. However, it would be a paper title because Sergio isn’t considered to be the best fighter at 160 any longer. He’s gotten old, and he’s starting to suffer a lot of injuries. If Cotto is doing this for his legacy then he needs to fight the best fighter at 160 in Gennady Golovkin.
That’s the only fight that will make a difference for Cotto’s legacy. Beating an old Sergio Martinez right now will look like Cotto waited him out until he was old before deciding to fight him. Against a prime Sergio Martinez, Cotto would likely have been knocked out and easily beaten. But against a faded version, he has a chance to win. But Cotto doesn’t have the size to defend the belt for long without taking a lot of punishment against bigger fighters.
There are a lot of weak contenders in the 160 lb. division, but it’s not even worth it for Cotto to waste what’s left of his career defending the WBC strap if he does in fact capture it. If he’s not going to fight Golovkin or Peter Quillin, then what’s the point? Beating an old Sergio Martinez will just make Cotto look like he dodged Golovkin to pick the more vulnerable Martinez.
Cotto is better off fighting Canelo because it’s a bigger money fight than the Sergio fight after the PPV numbers come in. Of course, Cotto has made mistakes before in choosing opponents. He could have made over $10 million last year to fight a rematch with Manny Pacquiao, but instead he fought for way, way less than that against Austin Trout last December and was easily beaten by him. What a mistake. Now Cotto appears to be on his way to making a second mistake in fighting the nearly 40-year-old Sergio Martinez instead of Canelo.
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