By Dan Ambrose: WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (39-4, 32 KOs) still hasn’t picked out his next opponent for his next fight. His trainer Freddie Roach is saying that he’s helping out in the selection process of picking the next guy he’ll be fighting.
Roach says that Cotto’s adviser Gaby Penagaricano has already given him two names to pick from, and he says he’ll give him another two names soon to come up with a final name. Roach will then select the guy he likes the most, and obviously the one that the 34-year-old Cotto has the best chance of beating.
“He’s given me two names, and later he’ll give me another two names,” Roach said via Steve Kim at UCN. “I’ll tell him who I like.”
A name that you’ll likely not see included in the gang of four is Gennady Golovkin’s name. It doesn’t look like Cotto’s people have any interest in mixing it up with the hard hitting Kazakhstan fighter. Even if Penagaricano did include Golovkin’s name to the list, Roach would likely steer clear of that guy.
Roach has already come up with a number of excuses for why he doesn’t like Golovkin for Cotto, starting with Golovkin not being a pay-per-view fighter. Roach says that he never sees Golovkin on television.
I think more likely the problem is that Golovkin has too much power and skills for Cotto, and Roach doesn’t want to be seen as the guy who green-lighted a fight between them. It would obviously look really bad if Roach picked Golovkin out of the four names for Cotto to fight, and then he turned around and obliterated Cotto in 4 bloody rounds.
While Roach made sure not to mention the two names that he’s seen already, it’s rumored that the two fighters are Brandon Rios and Tim Bradley. We’re talking welterweights here. They would be expected to move up to at least 155 pounds to fight Cotto at a catch-weight. This would likely be Cotto’s only title defense of his WBC 160 pound belt, because in his next defense of his WBC title later in 2015, he would be expected to face Golovkin, his mandatory challenger.
It would be nice to see Cotto take that fight, but it’s just not probable that he’ll do that. At 34, Cotto seems to be getting matched up very, very carefully. We’ve seen that in his last two fights against Delvin Rodriguez and Sergio Martinez. Roach assisted Cotto in selecting both of those guys, as neither of them had enough in the tank at this point in their careers to compete with Cotto.
Other than Rios and Bradley, we’re probably looking at other welterweights like Marcos Maidana, Amir Khan and Paulie Malignaggi. I can definitely see Roach ruling out a fight between Cotto and Khan or Maidana. If those two wind up as one of the four names that Penagaricano gives to Roach, I don’t think either of them will get picked. I see it coming down to Cotto fighting Rios or Bradley. Those are nice safe picks for him where he won’t have to risk getting beaten down and stopped like he was against Antonio Margarito many years ago.
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