By Dan Ambrose: It looks like WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (39-4, 32 KOs) will be looking to fight an older guy from a lower division in facing 41-year-old Cornelius Bundrage (34-5, 19 KOs) in Cotto’s first and likely last title defense of his WBC 160 pound title on June 6th at a still to be determined venue in New York.
El Nuevodia is reporting that the announcement for the Cotto-Bundrage fight could come next week some time. On Friday, ESPN Deportes reported that Cotto would be fighting #1 WBC middleweight contender Jorge Sebastian Heiland next, but it looks like Cotto and his adviser Gaby Penagaricano are going with the better known fighter in Bundrage, even though he’s a lot older and he fights in the junior middleweight division.
Cotto and Penagaricano are taking a huge risk in selecting Bundrage as his next opponent. It’s not so much the risk of Cotto losing, but rather the risk of very, very low pay-per-view numbers. Cotto-Bundrage is not a fight that would likely do well at all on pay-per-view, and it’s going to be asking a lot for them to try and get boxing fans to purchase the Cotto-Bundrage fight on HBO PPV.
It’s a decent ESPN level fight, but I don’t think it’s worthy of even regular HBO, much less HBO PPV. Bundrage is just not a big name. The troubling part about this is that Cotto could likely make big money in a fight against Gennady Golovkin on HBO PPV. Why would Cotto take the smaller money to fight a guy without a fan base like Bundrage?
It doesn’t make sense unless you see it as a title-milking type of fight for Cotto. He looks like he’s taking the least amount of risk that he can so that he can keep his career moving forward long enough for cash out fights against Floyd Mayweather Jr, Manny Pacquiao or Saul “Canelo” Alvarez. Cotto likely wants to face all three of them before he retires from the sport.
By facing Bundrage, and then subsequently vacating his WBC middleweight title rather than facing Golovkin, Cotto could taint his time as the WBC middleweight champion. While some boxing fans were impressed that Cotto was able to move up in weight to defeat the 39-year-old Sergio Martinez last year in June, Cotto could come across as looking like a paper champion if he chooses not to face Golovkin.
The World Boxing Council recently said that the winner of Cotto’s next voluntary title defense will need to fight WBC interim champion Golovkin. Cotto responded that he won’t be told who to fight. This means that he’s going to do what he wants to do, and that means that there’s a good chance we won’t be seeing Cotto fight Golovkin.
If Cotto decides that he wants to give up the WBC title, then it really doesn’t make sense that the title will be on the line for his fight against the light middleweight Bundrage. Why defend the title if you’re not going to defend it against Golovkin? It makes no sense at all.
I don’t think that Cotto and Penagaricano are too concerned about Bundrage isn’t a middleweight. This fight is going to be targeted towards the casual boxing fans, who likely won’t have a clue that Bundrage doesn’t fight in the same division as Cotto. Even if they did know, it’s doubtful that they would care. This is more about giving Cotto a body to fight, and an opponent that he has a good chance of beating. Bundrage is a decent fighter, but he’s old and he was beaten not too long ago by Ishe Smith in 2013.
As long as Cotto doesn’t lay up against the ropes, he should have a decent chance of beating Bundrage. You can’t really be sure with Cotto what he’s capable of doing any longer, because he’s taken some beatings in his career, and he’s not faced anyone good in the last three years since he was beaten by Austin Trout in 2012. If Bundrage is able to get Cotto against the ropes, he could chop him down the same way that Antonio Margarito did. Additionally, Cotto doesn’t have great stamina and Bundrage could wear Cotto down and take him out in the last three rounds.
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