It will be intriguing to appraise both Miguel Cotto and Canelo Alvarez from a physical standpoint at the weigh-in. The WBC told me my offer was not reasonable to them.
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The sting from Mayweather-Pacquiao is still there, which makes anyone who spent $100 to watch that overhyped snoozer think twice about wasting their money on boxing again.
While the fight is an attractive one, it won’t match the pay-per-view record set six months ago.
Roach also notes that Cotto will only rehydrate to around 160 pounds, whereas he expects Canelo to tip the fight-day scales at approximately 175.
Cotto was stripped of the belt on Tuesday by the WBC after the Puerto Rican refused to pay the $300,000 sanctioning fee ahead of the fight at Mandalay Bay.
Alvarez and Cotto are different, hardy fighting warriors for whom the battle itself is the truest test of man, not the wit of his put-downs or the carat of his bling.
“For $1.1 million I can buy any belt I want and be champion of whatever I want in my house”, Cotto said. There’s a side of me that would like to see Cotto win because he was my favorite fighter as a kid and I would have liked to have fought a great like him.
Saturday’s bout is also a continuing chapter in the rivalry between Puerto Rican and Mexican fighters. And to be completely transparent, if Mayweather’s fights were included in the chart beyond just the times he fought Canelo, Pacquiao, and Cotto, all of those fights (sans the Berto fight) would be at the top of the range.
De La Hoya believes Alvarez is the next big thing in boxing, ready to take over the pay-per-view dates in May and September that Mayweather dominated in recent years. “However, I did better against Austin Trout, and Cotto didn’t do that good against Austin Trout”, Alvarez said.
“My focus is winning this fight – it’s very important”, Alvarez said. “We are going to apply our plan the best way possible”. He went to Hall of Fame trainer Freddie Roach to revitalize his career, and has stopped all three of his opponents since. The IBF bantamweight title will be on the line with Randy Caballero (22-0, 13 KO) returning to make his first defense against Lee Haskins (32-3, 14 KO), and Japan’s Takashi Miura (29-2-2, 22 KO) will make his US debut with a WBC super featherweight title defense against Francisco Vargas (22-0-1, 16 KO). Let us know what you think in the comments. Golovkin packed Madison Square Garden last month for his win over David Lemieux, and Cotto-Alvarez could cap off the year with a huge fight of their own. “I am training. I’ve had a lot of fights, and I’ve learned a lot”, he said.
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It promises, at least on the surface, to be everything Mayweather-Pacquiao was not, an all-action, explosive slugfest between a pair of world class boxers with everything to play for.
