WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto’s adviser Gabriel Penagaricano says that a unification fight between Cotto and WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (30-0, 27 KOs) is just one of the possible options available for Cotto’s next fight in December. However, they have other options that they’re going to explore as well and they’ll make a determination once they decide on which is the best opponent to take for the fight.
Penagaricano says they haven’t yet sat down to discuss which of the guys that Cotto will be facing yet, but they’ll be doing that soon.
If Cotto wants to have his next fight on HBO pay-per-view, he’s going to need to face someone along the lines of Golovkin, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez or Julio Cesar Chavez Jr next, because Cotto’s pay-per-view numbers for his last fight against former WBC middleweight champion Sergio Martinez were rumored to be less than spectacular.
In hindsight, it was a bad idea by Cotto, Top Rank and HBO to make the Cotto-Martinez fight a PPV bout, because Martinez was never a PPV fighter and he hadn’t fought regularly since 2012. With Martinez not having fought in the last 14 months after coming off of a questionable win over Martin Murray last year in April, Cotto and Top Rank were asking for trouble in choosing to make a fight against him a PPV fight.
“I saw it on Saturday. Not surprised,” Penagaricano said to ESPN.com about the Golovkin vs. Daniel Geale fight. “Everyone wants to call out the big names, right? We have not begun to discuss options for the next fight. Probably I will be sitting down with Miguel in the coming days to start planning. It’s a fight to consider. I am sure we will be discussing it soon among other options.”
Where Penagaricano lumps Golovkin in as just another fighter calling out the “big names,” he’s not acknowledging that the vast majority of the boxing world sees Golovkin as the No.1 fighter in the middleweight division and Cotto No.2. Cotto is obviously the more popular fighter of the two, so Penagaricano is correct in saying he’s a big name. But Golovkin isn’t just some unknown guy looking for a payday. He’s the fighter that fans see as being the best fighter at 160.
Cotto’s options are few for his December fight because the only real possibility he has for that date is Golovkin or Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. Saul “Canelo” Alvarez isn’t in play until next year during Cinco de Mayo in May of 2015. Besides that, Canelo needs a confidence booster after his poor performance against Erislandy Lara this month. Canelo failed to prove that he was better than Lara, and he was out-boxed for most of the fight.
