Cotto-Canelo four-city promotional tour starts today in Los Angeles, CA

By Boxing News - 08/24/2015 - Comments

cottoBy Allan Fox: WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (40-4, 33 KOs) and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (45-1-1, 32 KOs) will be meeting today for the first day of their four-city promotional tour in Los Angeles, California.

The media tour is to publicize the November 21st Cotto vs. Canelo fight on HBO pay-per-view from the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Today’s Cotto-Canelo media tour will take place at the Hollywood & Highland Center at 6801 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90028. Best of all, it’s open to the boxing public. This is a positive.

Tickets for the Cotto-Canelo fight go on sale on Tuesday, August 25th, and are said to be from $2 thousand to $150. The tickets are considerably more expensive than the October 17th unification fight between IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin and David Lemieux probably because of Cotto and Canelo having a bigger fan base as a whole than the two of those fighters.

Golovkin is quickly becoming as popular as Canelo and Cotto, but his opponent Lemieux isn’t as well known in the United States with the casual boxing fans. On Tuesday, Cotto-Canelo will be in Mexico City, Mexico for the second city of the four-city media tour. On Wednesday, they’ll be in New York. On Thursday, they’ll complete their final stop of their promotional tour in Caguas, Puerto Rico.

There’s a lot of anticipation from boxing fans in the Cotto-Canelo fight, as it’s arguably the second biggest fight of the year. The biggest fight of the year thus far is the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao fight on May 2nd on HBO and Showtime pay-per-view. The fight wasn’t an entertaining affair, but it brought in 4.4 million PPV buys.

Canelo’s promoter Oscar De La Hoya has been saying recently that the Cotto-Canelo fight will break records. He doesn’t say what kind of records that it’ll break. He’s expecting large PPV numbers. Dan Rafael of ESPN doesn’t see the fight bringing in big numbers though, and he may be right.

Canelo and Cotto, as popular as they are, have only been averaging 300,000 PPV buys when they’re the headline fight and not matched against Mayweather or Pacquiao. Canelo an Cotto seem to need one of those two fighters for them to bring in the big PPV numbers, which suggests that they’ve failed to become crossover stars like Pacquiao, Mayweather and De La Hoya achieved with their careers. Cotto and Canelo are popular, but their support seems to be driven largely by their built in fan base in the United States.

The Cotto-Canelo fight will take place at a catch-weight of 155lbs rather than the full weight of 160lbs. This is due to the two fighters not seeing themselves as middleweights. It’s understandable for the 5’7” Cotto, who rehydrates to around 160 for his fights at middleweight. But for Canelo, it’s hard to understand why he doesn’t see himself as a middleweight. Canelo weighs as much at 175 for his fights at junior middleweight, and he clearly is a middleweight whether he wants to call himself one or not. But by keeping himself perched in the 154lb division in name only, Canelo stays in the position where he can fight welterweights like Mayweather and middleweights like Cotto.

Once Canelo commits to the middleweight division, it might become harder for him to get fights against welterweights because they might struggle with the idea of them fighting a middleweight, but there’s no difference from what Canelo is now. He’s a 175lb middleweight to drains down occasionally to 154 but mostly to 155 nowadays for his fights. However, the money that welterweights can make fighting Canelo at any weight will likely continue to lure them up in weight to fight him in the future.



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