COTTO vs. MARGARITO
A Gift To Boxing From “Money” Mayweather!

By Eric Raskin

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, well, you know the rest. In boxing, though, identifying a duck is never that simple.

Ever since Floyd Mayweather entered the welterweight division, the accusations have flown his way regarding various challenges he’s waddled away from. For a while it was Antonio Margarito whom Mayweather was “ducking,” as “Pretty Boy” turned down an $8-million offer to fight the Mexican. Lately, it’s been Miguel Cotto’s fans using the “D” word, since the Puerto Rican has all but cleaned out the division in establishing himself as the top contender to the lineal title held by Mayweather, only to see “Money” chase dollar signs instead of letting Cotto chase him around the ring.

The question is this: Is Mayweather spinelessly ducking his toughest challenges? Or is he using that thing right above his spine and showing his marketing brilliance in letting Cotto and Margarito build themselves up into bigger attractions? That’s a debate that will go on until Mayweather fights one of them.

But in the meantime, we have Cotto and Margarito set to fight each other on July 26, and regarding that showdown, there is no debate: This is a matchup that screams Fight of the Year, and we have Mayweather and either his cowardice or his genius to thank for it.
While Mayweather’s actions make such nicknames as “Donald Duck” (for his Trump-like obsession with money) or “Daffy Duck” (for his involvement with such silly and trivial pursuits as pro wrestling) arguably applicable, Cotto and Margarito’s mutual eagerness to face each other shows that for some fighters, ducking simply isn’t an option. In his first 12 months at 147 pounds, Cotto defeated Carlos Quintana, Zab Judah, and Shane Mosley, three men still ranked among The Ring’s top six contenders in boxing’s deepest division, even after losing to Cotto. Margarito’s resume glitters a bit less, but in going 3-1 against Paul Williams, Kermit Cintron, and Joshua Clottey—three dangerous welterweights who’ve also claimed at one time or another to be the victim of ducking—he’s shown fearlessness of the highest order.

After Cotto and Margarito cleared a pair of hurdles at Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall of April 12, knocking out Alfonso Gomez and Cintron, respectively, both accepted each other’s challenge with the nonchalance we’ve come to expect from them.
“Cotto’s one of the best welterweights,” Margarito said in the ring after his sixth-round knockout of Cintron. “We’ll leave it up to [promoter] Bob Arum to see it whenever Cotto’s ready.”

“I’m ready for the guy who my company puts in front of me,” Cotto agreed after an easy five-round win over Gomez. “If it’s Margarito in July, I’m ready for him.”
The postfight press conference quickly turned into a prefight press conference, Cotto vs. Margarito becoming all but official as the two victors posed for pictures together. In truth, they had an agreement in place before the shared card in April (Cotto and Cintron also had an agreement in case Margarito ended up on the losing end), and all that remained as of press time was to sign off on some of the fine print and find a venue. Early on, the fight was rumored to be headed for Yankee Stadium, the first boxing match there in more than 30 years and the final one before the demolition of the legendary ballpark. Unfortunately, those rumors have been replaced with talk of a less distinctive venue, such as a Las Vegas casino.

But Cotto-Margarito could be held in a high school gym or in the lobby of Top Rank’s offices and it wouldn’t matter. This is a pairing of action fighters where all anyone will care about once the bell rings is what happens in those 400-or-so square feet inside the ropes.

“This is one of those matchups where you can’t miss, where you know you’re going to see something sensational. This is Gatti-Ward, this is Barrera-Morales, this is Vazquez-Marquez, this is Corrales-Castillo,” gushed HBO blow-by-blow man Jim Lampley, who called the April doubleheader and who will call the meeting of the winners in July. “The media perception would be that either man fighting Mayweather is a bigger fight. But for these two guys to face each other is one of those pre-figured style situations where it’s just impossible to imagine anything other than mayhem. And at the end of the day, what the fight grosses is academic to me. People ask me, ‘What’s your favorite fight that you ever called?’ and my answer certainly has nothing to do with whether it generated 2.4 million pay-per-view buys. It has only to do with what I saw with my own two eyes.

“There are quite a number of fights where you sit there and say to yourself, How in the world do human beings do this? And this is one of those fights where I fully expect in advance that I’ll be having that thought process at some point.”

It’s funny how things work out sometimes. Margarito could have fought Cotto last summer, but he opted to fight Williams instead (we’d say he “ducked” Cotto, but how can you call it ducking when you willingly take on an undefeated 6'1" southpaw?), lost a close decision, and here we are a year later and Cotto-Margarito is far hotter than it would have been in ’07. In part, it’s hotter because the 30-year-old Margarito has scored two demolitions since the Williams fight, an academic first-round blowout of Golden Johnson on the Cotto-Mosley undercard and then the win over Cintron, a vicious puncher whose only two defeats have come at the hands of Margarito.

But mostly, it’s hotter because of what Cotto has done in the last 12 months. He knocked out Judah before a raucous Madison Square Garden crowd in a Fight of the Year contender. He showed his versatility in outboxing future Hall of Famer Mosley. Then Quintana, whom Cotto destroyed in five rounds in December ’06, upset Williams, making Cotto’s win over his countryman that much more meaningful. And though the Gomez fight was almost as much of a mismatch as Margarito-Johnson, it featured another eye-opening display of skill and power by the 27-year-old Puerto Rican, the perfect “how do you pick against either of these guys?” counterpart to Margarito’s win over Cintron in the same ring.

“Cotto’s maybe the most all-around talented fighter in the welterweight division,” observed Cintron’s trainer, Emanuel Steward. “But when you have a guy that can take a punch like Margarito, and a physically big guy at 5'11", that’s going to be a tough, tough fight. Cotto has the edge in skill, but it’s going to be a hell of a fight.”

And it’s happening thanks to Mayweather, who, since winning the world welterweight title, took a non-title fight for ridiculous money against junior middleweight Oscar De La Hoya (can’t fault Pretty Boy for that one), took on junior welter champ Ricky Hatton for only slightly less ridiculous money (can’t hold that one against him either), and is now in the midst of a nine-month boxing sabbatical while he rests up for a September rematch with De La Hoya. Hardcore fans are alternately yawning and whining over that businessperson’s special, and they’re doubly livid over rumors of Mayweather wanting a rematch with Hatton—whom he kayoed convincingly last December—after that. But is such down-the-road talk just more of Mayweather’s master plan to make it look like he’s ducking Cotto and make the fans beat the drum that much louder as the anticipation builds and builds?

It’s certainly had that effect on Arum, who used to promote Mayweather and who promotes the two men breathing down his neck.

“Top Rank fighters fight. Antonio and Miguel are Top Rank fighters. No nonsense, they come to fight,” Arum said after the April 12 doubleheader. “No Mickey Mouse, no 24/7s, no dropping F-bombs, but real, honest, working fighters.”

Ironically, if Mayweather caved to that trash talk and agreed to fight either Cotto or Margarito instead of De La Hoya, then we wouldn’t be getting Cotto vs. Margarito. And some might suggest that Cotto-Margarito, already a phenomenal fight fans’ fight, becomes more of a mainstream event because of the way Mayweather, and the undeniable pressure for him to fight the winner, looms over it.

“You can’t begin a sentence about Margarito and Cotto without at some point mixing in the subjunctive clause, and Floyd is the subjunctive clause in the fight,” Lampley said. “I think we all know that whoever wins, one of the first questions he’ll be asked in the ring after the fight is, ‘Are you going to call Floyd tomorrow?’ Particularly if it’s Cotto, because that’s where the discussion lies right now anyway. If Cotto can beat a guy like Margarito, who is longer, taller, equally violent, if Cotto can go and do exciting business against him, there’s going to be that much more of a reverb, that much more of a rising tide of demand that we get to see it.”

Lampley went on to compare Mayweather vs. Cotto to two past fights, arguably the best bout of the ’80s and the best bout of the ’90s. He noted that Cotto is not quite enough of a household name yet to make this fight into the modern-day Ray Leonard vs. Tommy Hearns. More likely, if the fight were happening now, it would be more akin to Julio Cesar Chavez-Meldrick Taylor, a fight that was just as thrilling as Leonard-Hearns but nowhere near as transcendent an event. Perhaps in 2009, if Cotto beats Margarito first and Mayweather defeats De La Hoya again, with Mayweather and Cotto both bringing perfect records into the ring, this welterweight championship showdown would cross over into that Leonard-Hearns realm.

However, by “ducking” Cotto, Mayweather is gambling with the very realistic possibility that Margarito defeats the Puerto Rican. Mayweather vs. a victorious Margarito would be big, but it wouldn’t draw any comparisons to Leonard-Hearns. Not to mention, if Cotto-Margarito is the Fight of the Year contender that most of us expect it to be, and if the lesser star wins, then there’s likely to be a rematch (and maybe a rubber match) in place of a meeting with the pound-for-pound king.

The question remains, is Mayweather rooting for Cotto, on account of the reigning champ really wanting that fight and simply biding his time to make it bigger? Or is he rooting against Cotto, because he wants no part of a younger, stronger, hungrier bodypunching machine who’s becoming more and more difficult for him to ignore?

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who and what scenario Mayweather is rooting for; it’s Cotto and Margarito who will determine their fates, the fate of the division, and what Mayweather’s options and obligations will be. Mayweather may loom over the fight, but Cotto and Margarito will be the stars on July 26. They’re guaranteed to give us the sort of blood-and-guts action fight Mayweather has always done his best to stay out of.

And it wouldn’t be happening without the moneymaking mindset—be that a compliment or an insult—of Mayweather.