By Frank Gonzalez Jr. – June 14th, 2009 – “I didn’t expect this decision. I won this fight. I want a rematch!” Those were the words of Joshua Clottey Saturday night at Madison Square Garden, after 12 grueling rounds against Welterweight titlist Miguel Cotto (34-1, 27 KO’s) who put his WBO belt on the line to fight Joshua Clottey (35-3, 20 KO’s), who had to relinquish his IBF title to make this fight happen.
This was a good fight with lots of back and forth action. It was about as good a match up as you can make these days. On paper, Clottey landed more and at a higher percentage but numbers don’t always win rounds. Numbers don’t account for ring generalship, defense and effective offense..
The fight started at a fairly fast pace, with Cotto aggressively moving in and out of Clottey’s range, popping him with jabs and body shots and then moving back out of range. Clottey showed a nice jab. So did Cotto, who often used it to attack the body. Clottey used his longer reach to score a few good shots. Near the end of the first round, Cotto caught Clottey with a jab that was at the right place at the right time and Clottey went down. Clottey got up quick but by the time he was ready to continue, the round was over. So Clottey started by being down an extra point.
Cotto had a little success with his jab and mobile style, Clottey was adjusting to Cotto’s footwork and used his jab to set up his long range uppercuts. When he wasn’t punching, Clottey kept his hands high and showed good defense. Cotto was a shade busier.
Clottey and Cotto boxed cautiously and the crowd jeered some until they picked up the pace and started to exchange more punches. During an exchange in the third round, they banged heads and Cotto got the worst of it; a nasty cut over his left eye that would bother him for the remainder of the contest. Clottey was landing at a high percentage, his punches were a bit cleaner and he did enough to win the third and fourth rounds on my card. Cotto regained the momentum to win the fifth, when after Clottey had landed several punches, Cotto forced Clottey into the corner and when Clottey attempted to bull rush his way out, he ran into Cotto, who shook him off in an aikido like manner that saw Clottey fall to the canvas in an awkward way.
The referee, Arthur Mercante Jr., stopped the clock and gave Clottey the option of five minutes time to recover from the fall. Clottey appeared to have hurt his left knee when he fell. Mercante walked with him around the ring, telling him to, “Walk it off like a Champion would.” It took a couple of rounds for Clottey to regain his legs and in the mean time, Cotto won rounds five and six, pressuring Clottey into the corner ropes and trapping him there with barrages of punches.
There was a lot of back and forth action in round seven, where Josh Clottey picked up the pace and started throwing combinations with a focus on his right, which he landed frequently and effectively. With blood dripping into Cotto’s left eye, Clottey was able to make Cotto’s discomfort even worse by aiming his right hand at that target. Clottey rallied strongly to take rounds seven through ten, compliments of his effective right hand punching.
Cotto was looking fatigued and quite bothered by the cut but he sucked it up and when it looked like Clottey was going to take over the fight, Cotto, fatigued and weakened, did his job; he threw his jab, followed up with rights to the head and body and though his speed had diminished, he took the fight to Clottey, who got stuck playing defense and didn’t do enough on offense. Cotto continued in this mode into the final moments of the last round. Surprisingly, Clottey didn’t do enough to win either of the last two rounds, which are so critical in a 12 round fight.
The Judges took it from there, with scores of 116-111 and 115-112 for Cotto and 114-113 for Clottey. Before the fight started, I figured Cotto would get the Decision if it was close. That turned out to be the case. I had Cotto winning 114-113. Cotto walked away with a Split Decision win.
If Clottey were consistently more aggressive in terms of punch output, he would be much more dangerous because he has good punching technique and creates good power from the torque built up from his long arms in motion. His defense is very good but this is a case of too much of a good thing being a bad thing. Clottey should know that you can’t win rounds on defense alone. We live and learn and sometimes, we get burned. Does Clottey deserve a rematch with Cotto? Sure. But as much as rivalries are great for boxing (which doesn’t have enough of them these days), Cotto appears to be at the point of passing his peak now. His lack of stamina in late rounds combined with his loss of speed when it matters most was what lost him the fight with Margarito and almost cost him the fight with Clottey Saturday night.
At 28 years old, Cotto is still fairly young and with the right cardio training he should be able to correct his late round stamina issue, where he fades after eight or nine rounds. With the firing of his former trainer, Evangelista Cotto, new team needs to do more to improve his stamina because all the skills in the world won’t mean anything if you run out of gas too early.
So who’s next for Miguel Cotto, now that he’s two fights removed from his devastating loss to Antonio Margarito? Margarito should be cleared to fight in a couple of months and I can’t think of a bigger fight for Cotto in the future than a rematch against the only man to beat him in the pros.
Some people want to blame mysterious hand wraps for Margarito’s success against Cotto and just about everyone he’s beaten since the media hounds took this story and ran it to the point that every time Margarito is mentioned, the word cheating is almost always part of the sentence. Funny thing about those hand wraps is that they were of zero consequence against the “incredibly new and improved” Shane Mosley, who looked like he was ready for the glue factory after scoring a KO in 12 over a very washed up Ricardo Mayorga only a few months before he beat Margarito like a bastard step child, until the referee mercifully stopped it.
Other than a redemption rematch against Margarito, I’d like to see Cotto (or any of the top guys at Welter) do us all a favor and get rid of that pretender with a title; Andre Berto, who is little more than an untested prospect—even though he’s the WBC “champion of the world.” Hey, if Clottey had to give up his IBF strap to fight Cotto, we know that the Alphabet Orgs are not keen on Unification match ups. More titlists means more sanctioning fees and that’s why there are no actual “Champions” in boxing anymore. But hey, what can we do, write letters to the WBC, IBF, WBA and WBO, who will keep those letters on file in case they ever run out of toilet tissue?
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