De La Hoya: Cotto has an excuse to come back

By Boxing News - 12/04/2017 - Comments

Image: De La Hoya: Cotto has an excuse to come back

By Dan Ambrose: Oscar De La Hoya says Miguel Cotto has a good excuse to make a comeback due to his injured left biceps he suffered in his loss to Sadam Ali (26-1, 14 KOs) last Saturday night at Madison Square Garden in New York.

De La Hoya notes that Cotto wasn’t 100 percent after injuring his left arm in round 7. He believes there’s a chance Cotto (41-6, 33 KOs) made decide to keep fighting once he’s had time to think on it.

Ali (26-1, 14 KOs) beat Cotto by a close 12 round unanimous decision. Cotto was in control of the fight until he hurt his left biceps in the 7th. After that point in the fight, Cotto’s work rate dropped off dramatically, and Ali was able to take command of the fight and outwork the 37-year-old Puerto Rican star the remainder of the way. The injury changed the whole complexion of the fight. Without the injury, Cotto would have had a good chance of winning. With the injury, Cotto never had a chance. He was boxing with one arm for the most part after the 7th.

“He does have a torn bicep, which is really, really bad,” said De La Hoya to secondsout.com about Cotto. “He does have an excuse to come back, because he wasn’t 100 percent. But after looking and talking to him, and he says, ‘That’s it for me,’ but I don’t know. Once a fighter always a fighter. Somebody like Miguel Cotto, you never know if he’s going to come back or not. It’s his decision,” said De La Hoya.

If De La Hoya wants Cotto to make a comeback, he’s going to need to give him a good pep talk, and offer him a rematch with Ali or a shot at a rematch against Saul Canelo Alvarez. Offering that fight to Cotto might be what the doctor ordered. There’s a lot of money Cotto can make fighting Canelo a second time, and it would help cushion his retirement.

Cotto lost a 12 round unanimous decision to Canelo in November 2015. The scores were a lot wider than the fight that took place that night. The judges had Canelo winning 118-110, 119-109 and 117-110. The scores were embarrassingly bad. It was like the judging that we saw in the Canelo vs. Gennady Golovkin fight. But instead of having 1 terrible score, there were 3 horribly lopsided scores handed down by the judges. With the way the judges scored his fight with Canelo, Cotto never stood a chance to win by a decision. The only way he was going to win that fight was by knocking Canelo out, and he didn’t have the power to do that.

”I don’t know what he’s going to decide. He’s had a great career. He fought everyone in his prime. He fought the very best,” said De La Hoya.

Cotto fought a lot of top fighters during his career. I wouldn’t say he fought everyone though. Cotto never fought Golovkin, Daniel Jacobs, and he never fought the top junior middleweights like the Charlo brothers, Erislandy Lara or Demetrius Andrade.

For Cotto to come back at this point, it would likely be to fight Ali again. It’s possible that once he’s had time to digest his loss to Ali, he’ll want to make a comeback to avenge the loss. I don’t see it happening, but anything is possible when it comes to Cotto.