By Dan Ambrose: Todd duBoef, the president of Top Rank, thinks that trainer Freddie Roach was instrumental in turning the career around for the 33-year-old Miguel Cotto (38-4, 31 KO’s) to put him in position to get his nice payday fight against WBC middleweight champion Sergio Martinez (51-2-2, 28 KO’s) on June 7th.
DuBoef really believes that Cotto has come full circle to where he started out earlier in his career when he was throwing left hooks almost nonstop. To DuBoef’s way of thinking, Cotto’s recent 3rd round annihilation of Delvin Rodriguez proved that he’s come back and is now a top fighter once again.
“I think Miguel proved to all of us, and more importantly, he proved to himself with Freddie roach he is one of the top fighters in the world today, and what he was lacking was his preparation,” DuBoef said to ESPN. “If it wasn’t for Freddie Roach, who changed his strategy and training, we may not have seen that Cotto against Delvin. I think we’ll see the same Miguel against Martinez.”
I’m not so sure that a win over a mediocre ESPN level fighter like Delvin Rodriguez translates into Cotto being the same fighter he was 6 years ago before his head down at the hands of Antonio Margarito. To me all Cotto proved in beating Rodriguez is that he can beat a fighter that Austin Trout easily beat. Beating Delvin and beating someone like Sergio Martinez is a whole different thing altogether.
When you look at the empty wins that Cotto has picked up since 2007, you’ll notice that he really hasn’t beaten anyone one good opponent during the last 7 years.
Here are the guys that Cotto has beaten in the last 7 years:
Delvin Rodriguez – Who?
Antonio Margarito – coming off of 3 eye surgeries and a year long layoff when Cotto beat him
Ricardo Mayorga – 38-years-old and way, way past his prime when Cotto beat him
Yuri Foreman – No power and a bad knee that folded on him during the fight
Joshua Clottey – Not a great fighter with stamina problems.
Michael Jennings – Who?
Alfonso Gomez – A light welterweight that was made to order for Cotto.
Shane Mosley – a controversial win for Cotto that many fans felt he lost.
Out of all those fights, Mosley was the only one that was good, and Cotto’s win over him was controversial. Cotto has lost against the only good opposition he’s faced during that the last 7 years in defeats against Manny Pacquiao, Margarito [before his eye injury], Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Austin Trout.
I don’t think for a second that Freddie Roach has turned Cotto’s career around. Instead, I think his career has been turned backwards by matching him against a weak opponent in Delvin Rodriguez. Now we have Roach talking about how he’s turned things around for Cotto when in reality all they’ve done is matched him against the type of opposition he was fighting earlier in his career before he was beaten by Margarito, Mayweather, Pacquiao and Trout.
On June 7th, Sergio Martinez will expose Cotto in the same way that Mayweather and Trout did.
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