By Dan Ambrose: Former WBC middleweight champion Sergio Martinez (51-3-2, 28 KOs) has an appointment on September 16th with a doctor to have him exam him to see if he’s still fit to continue fighting, according to Dan Rafael.
Depending on how things go with the exam, Martinez, 39, could continue his career or possibly hang up the gloves. The area that is most concern it would seem is Martinez’s surgically repaired right knee. His knee look weak in his last fight against Miguel Cotto last June.
Each time Martinez was hit hard by Cotto, his right knee would wobble as if it was going to collapse from under him. Martinez ended up getting stopped in the 10th round, but the fight arguably should have been stopped in the 1st round after he was knocked down three times by Cotto.
Martinez fought poorly for the remainder of the fight, and was little more than a punching bag for Cotto until the fight was mercifully stopped by his trainer. Martinez hadn’t fought in 14 months prior to the Cotto fight, and during that time he’d had two knee surgeries on his right knee.
The smart thing for Martinez to have done would have been for him to take a couple of tune-up fights to make sure that his knee was still sound before he took the Cotto fight, but instead he went for the big money and took the fight without any tune-up.
It reminded me a lot of how Antonio Margarito took a rematch with Cotto after a year out of the ring and three eye surgeries. Instead of doing the smart thing and taking a couple of tune-ups to make sure his eye would hold together, Margarito went for the money fight against Cotto, and as you would expect it, Margarito’s surgically repaired eye closed up almost immediately.
The fight ended up being stopped after the 9th due to the swelling of Margarito’s right eye. It was good match-making by Cotto to take the Margarito fight after the surgery rather than before it, because Cotto likely would have been knocked out again had Margarito had two good eyes.
Martinez’s knee looked bad in the Cotto fight. Some boxing fans think that his knee looked that way because of Cotto’s power, but Martinez didn’t move well even before he was hit. The quick foot speed that he once had was gone. He looked like someone who was moving through a foot of snow in the ring, and that made it easy for the 5’7” Cotto to catch up to him and land his shorter punches.
“We will go to New York together and Sergio will see his doctor,” said Martinez’s adviser Sampson Lewkowicz to Dan Rafael of ESPN. “He [Martinez] will have a complete checkup. We will listen to what the doctor has to say and then make a decision about his future.”
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