23.09.07 – By Vivek Wallace: On Thursday, September 20th, the poll to gauge the crowd favorite for the Miguel Cotto/Shane Mosley fight officially kicked off. The only reason the poll was considered to begin with was because there seemed to be no true understanding for who the actual crowd favorite was according the the reader comments.
There was no graph to view during the vote to maintain integrity and ensure that no one side could attempt to flood out the other based on being able to see the current leader. As odd as it may seem, after going the extra mile to see what the fans felt across the board, I can now say that the boxing poll did nothing more than add gasoline to an already heated debate because the results – which included every vote except my own – yielded an EXACT tie with 50% of the total votes going to Shane Mosley and 50% of the votes going to Miguel Cotto.
Some voters attempted to vote twice but each individual email address was only given one credit. Using this mere ‘hair-splitting’ technique didn’t change a thing when it was time to tally. Although the vote count itself gave no decisive winner, the comments rendered shed light on the fight in many ways. Perhaps for Shane Mosley this fight should be titled ‘7th Heaven’, because most of the voters who see him winning picked this round to be the one that he’ll get the job done in. What was even more telling, and to a degree a bit spooky, was the fact that Cotto’s supporters all had him – with the exception of maybe two voters – winning the fight in the late rounds if at all, with most of them calling for a split decision, including one voter that predicted a very controversial decision going in his favor.
This was pretty interesting when you think about the fact that Cotto’s fans tout his power and ability to break the body down and conquer his opponent, yet none of them see him winning this fight inside of 10 rounds if at all. At the very least I guess it’s safe to say this means that his supporters do at least respect Shane’s ability. Shane’s supporters on the other hand see an early to mid-round stoppage and all cite Cotto’s ‘chin’ as the culprit. To Cotto’s benefit, he has been able to come back and win fights after being stunned or hurt, but it’s hard to argue that any of the fighters that have ever had him in this situation were as talented as Mosley.
One thing about Cotto that I expected to hear in the Shane supporting voter comments that I didn’t hear was the fact that Cotto has a tendency to use the low blow to get a breather and stall the action. If you notice at the 1:41 mark in the first round against Zab Judah, (see youtube.com clip of the fight), Zab hurt Cotto, then as the onslaught continued, right under the 1:20 mark Cotto retaliated to buy himself some time. This continued throughout the fight. The same thing happened in the Ricardo Torres fight where the action was also stopped twice due to low blows.
Cotto supporters will argue that this is not a stall tactic but I have no idea how this ‘accident’ – (if you wanna call it that) – only happens when Cotto’s dazed and needs to regain his composure. I won’t say that this is gonna be a ‘layup’ for Mosley, but lets just say it’s a good thing that I decided to hold my vote because had I entered the poll, Mosley would have become the recipient of a split decision victory by one point. After further review, somehow, I believe this vote may be a whole lot closer than the fight itself. Soon enough we’ll all see.
(There will be an article and poll posted for the Pavlik/Taylor fight on Friday, September 28th).
(Got Feedback?: Write Vivek Wallace at vivexemail@yahoo.com or show some love at myspace.com/anonymouslyinvolved).