Roach wants Cotto to fight Mayweather after Canelo

By Boxing News - 08/31/2014 - Comments

roach45By Dan Ambrose: Trainer Freddie Roach say that he wants his fighter WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto to fight one more guy after his fight against Saul “Canelo” Alvarez next year, and that’s a rematch with Floyd Mayweather Jr.

Cotto would then retire after those two fights without facing Gennady Golovkin. As far as Cotto’s next fight on December 13th, Roach said Andy Lee or James Kirkland is two of the names they’re looking at.

Kirkland is a junior middleweight, and Lee fights at 154 and 160. If Cotto does face Mayweather and Canelo in his last two fights of his career then he’d be defending his WBC middleweight title in back to back fights against non-middleweights. If Cotto fights Kirkland then it would be three straight fights for Cotto against non-middleweights.

I don’t know of any middleweights champions in the past that have fought three straight fights against non-middleweights in defending their titles. Cotto would be a world champion 160 in name only if he’s defending over and over and over again against non-middleweights.

The thing is that Cotto might not be able to do this while holding onto the WBC middleweight title because Golovkin is fighting WBC interim middleweight champion Marco Antonio Rubio in October. If Golovkin wins that fight, then he’ll be the mandatory challenger for Cotto.

The World Boxing Council will allow Cotto to fight his voluntary defense in December and then another voluntary defense in May against Canelo, but after that, Cotto will need to defend against his mandatory challenger. He can’t have three voluntary defenses in a row. He can maybe take a unification fight if he wants to, but there’s no one for him to fight that has a name. Golovkin would likely knock Cotto out worse than Antonio Margarito did, Sam Soliman would out-box him, and Peter Quillin would be too big for him.

“I don’t think Canelo would love it,” Roach said to Radio Raheem in regards to Canelo fighting Cotto at Madison Square Garden. “I don’t think he’s brave enough to go into the lion’s den. There’s one guy out there that he said he can knockout if he’s in the kind of shape. Mayweather. There could be a rematch. He [Cotto] said ‘Freddie, if I fought him if I was in this kind of shape [the shape Cotto was when he beat 39-year-old Sergio Martinez] you got me in, I would have knocked him out.”

Roach then added that he thinks Mayweather will pull out of his rematch with Marcos Maidana next month saying, “Don’t be surprised if he pulls out of that fight.”

Roach also recently said don’t be surprised if Mayweather retires after the Maidana fight. So Roach is kind of on the retirement thing with him thinking Mayweather will retire either before or after the Maidana fight in order to presumably avoid fights.

Mayweather already beat Cotto by slugging with him. I don’t see there being any difference in a rematch. But if Mayweather does take that fight and beats Cotto a second time, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear Roach saying they were robbed and that they would beat him in a third fight if they were in tip top condition.

If you look at the kind of condition Cotto was in for the Mayweather fight in 2012, there’s no way Cotto wasn’t in the best shape for that fight. He’s 2 years older now, and I don’t think he’s even as good as he was when he fought Mayweather in 2012, and he’s definitely not as good a fighter as the one that Antonio Margarito destroyed in 2008.

I expect Cotto to get knocked out by Canelo next year, and I fully expect him to get knocked out by Kirkland if he fights him in December. Andy Lee is beatable, but why is Cotto taking a soft job like that age 33? It doesn’t make sense other than it being a title milking fight without Cotto fighting a real threat to him at 160.



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