Sadam Ali trained with Jacobs & Stevens for Cotto

By Boxing News - 11/28/2017 - Comments

Image: Sadam Ali trained with Jacobs & Stevens for Cotto

By Jeff Aranow: Welterweight Sadam Ali has been training with Daniel Jacobs and Curtis Stevens to get ready for the punching power of WBO junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto for their fight this Saturday night on HBO Boxing from Madison Square Garden in New York.

(Photo credit: Tom Hogan/Hogan Photos/Golden Boy Promotions)

Sadam Ali has a chance to send Cotto into retirement with a big fat loss on Saturday night. It would be in Ali’s best interest to beat Cotto. If he defeats him, Cotto might stick around a little longer to try and avenge his loss. If Ali can handle Cotto’s power, then he could get to the Puerto Rican star’s chin and take him out the way that Antonio Margarito did in 2008. Margarito beat Cotto with his high volume punch attack rather than power.

Ali (25-1, 14 KOs) is a huge underdog going into this fight with the 37-year-old Cotto, which is supposed to be his last fight of his career. Cotto says he’s retiring after this final fight. We’ll have to see if the retirement sticks. A lot of fighters retire, but they then come back to the sport due to boredom or them needing money. Cotto doesn’t need money, so if he does come back, it’ll be more of a case of being bored.

“He’s got power; I need to focus on not getting stuck. I worked a little bit with Danny Jacobs and Curtis Stevens for this fight,” said Ali.

It would have been interesting to see how well Ali did in his sparring sessions with Jacobs and Stevens. Jacobs seems like a nice guy. He probably didn’t look to KO Ali during the sparring sessions. You can bet that Cotto will be looking to KO Ali on Saturday night.

Cotto is easily the biggest puncher Ali will have faced during his 8-year pro career, but that doesn’t say much, because he’s not been fighting big punchers. The closest thing Ali has come to fighting a big puncher was his fight against Jessie Vargas last year. Ali failed that test in getting stopped in the 9th round after getting dropped twice in the fight. In fairness to Ali, Vargas loaded up on his shots and hit him with some big punches. Those shots would have dropped a lot of fighters. It’s just not a good sign that Ali went down after getting hit by them. Cotto hits harder than Vargas with every shot. Unless Ali’s chin has gotten better since the loss to Vargas, he’s going to be in trouble on Saturday.

“My motivation is being on HBO, it being a world title, and my career, honestly,” Ali said. “People say I didn’t deserve this fight, but they haven’t been paying attention to my career.”

The reason why boxing fans think Ai doesn’t deserve the title shot against Cotto is because he failed in his previous world title fight with Jessie Vargas. Ali has won 3 fights cine then, but he’s not fought anyone good. He’s only fought one decent level welterweight in his career, and he lost to him when he was stopped by Vargas. That loss said a lot about Ali, because Vargas is not a major player in the 147 lb. division. Yes, Vargas is a former WBO welterweight champion, but he was easily beaten by a past his best Manny Pacquiao and Tim Bradley. Both guys were at the end of their careers when they easily beat Vargas. So, the fact that Ali was completely dominated by Vargas suggests that he’s not someone that has the kind of talent to beat the better fighters.