Why Miguel Cotto Is Losing His Grip on the Middleweight Championship

You can count Miguel Cotto—and yours truly—among the few people who felt that the Puerto Rican legend had a big chance of strolling into New York’s Madison Square Garden last June 7 and walking out as middleweight champion of the world.

Cotto made his presence known just over a minute into the fight when he dropped defending lineal and WBC middleweight champion Sergio Martinez flat on his face.

Things only got worse for the Argentine, who tasted the canvas twice more in the opening stanza and was forced to retire on his stool after nine brutally one-sided rounds.

It was an epic performance from Cotto, a future Hall of Famer who became Puerto Rico’s first four-division world champion, but one that has quickly faded into the wind after a year of hemming and hawing but no follow-up performances.

Cotto had this to say about his future plans, per Puerto Rican news outlet El Nuevo Dia (h/t Miguel Rivera of BoxingScene.com):

"

[I signed] a three fight [deal] with Roc Nation. We have a date of June 6 and right now we are evaluating [the options] and we'll see which is the best opponent for that date. I will speak with Freddie and we will choose the best name. I do not know [who it may be], but I expect it to be for the title. It all depends on how big the opponent [will be in name] and that will define whether this will be a pay-per-view or not

"

The most likely contender to land the first fight of that three-fight deal appears to be IBF junior middleweight champion Cornelius “K9” Bundrage or little-known Argentine middleweight Jorge Sebastian Heiland.

Neither one is likely to herald the coming of tremendous praise from boxing fans who are tired of star fighters taking the path of least resistance to belts and larger-than-life paydays.

Cotto has never been one to veer from a challenge, and he’s never been tarred with anything close to the dreaded “ducker” label in a career marked by bouts against many good, great and elite fighters.

But what of this “for the title” and “whether this will be a pay-per-view or not” stuff?

The title that Cotto is obviously referring to is the lineal—the man who beat the man—and WBC Middleweight Championship that he took from Martinez.

Clearly, the title has lost some of its luster in light of the meteoric rise of Kazakh knockout machine—and possibly boogeyman that you tell children hides under the bed—Gennady Golovkin.

Alex Gallardo/Associated Press

Golovkin, regardless of "who-beat-the-man" considerations, is clearly the best fighter in the middleweight division. You’re not going to find a ton of legitimate debate on that question.

Fans want to see Cotto defend his title against 160 pounds of Central Asian destruction, should the Puerto Rican champion decide to continue his probably ill-fated run in one of boxing’s glamour divisions.

But that doesn’t seem terribly likely.

And there’s the essential conundrum.

You can’t defend the title against K9 or Heiland, a fighter with a 25-4-2 record that includes one significant win—a knockout of faded former contender Matthew Macklin—without raising a few eyebrows.

You can defend a belt, yes, but not the title.

Not against those guys.

And there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that either of those fights lands on PPV.

If Cotto vs. Martinez only did 350,000 PPV buys—in a fight with historical implications and boxers from fight-crazed nations—what do you think fights with the tricky-but-not-aesthetically-pleasing K9 or the unknown Heiland will draw?

Nothing. Nada. Zip.

Money may not be the overarching consideration for Cotto, who, per Kevin Iole of Yahoo Sports, received a $5 million signing bonus in his contract, but you can bet it will be for whichever network decides to televise the fight.

We’d be understating the nature of the situation quite a bit if we just said that Cotto’s in-ring decisions—his choice of promoter is irrelevant—over the past nine months have been curious.

There were the failed negotiations for a seemingly inevitable superfight with Mexican sensation Saul “Canelo” Alvarez on HBO PPV.

If we could hit the rewind button to the end of 2014 and survey 100 boxing fans by asking them which fight was more likely—Cotto vs. Canelo or Floyd Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquiao—you could safely bet the former would outweigh the latter by a sizable margin.

But here we are.

Mayweather and Pacquiao will meet on May 2.

Canelo will meet James Kirkland a week later, and Cotto will fight TBA a month after that.

Boxing can be a funny game, can’t it?

Negotiations for a Puerto Rico vs. Mexico showdown for the middleweight championship fell apart just days into the new year, and nobody is quite sure exactly why that happened.

It’s possible that Cotto was unwilling to commit, given the potential for a lucrative rematch with Mayweather, who was still opponent-searching at that point. Or maybe his money demands weren’t met. Or it could be something else.

Whatever the case may be, if Mayweather was the platinum plan and Canelo was the gold, K9 or Heiland is the “gold ring” you get out of a 25-cent machine outside the supermarket.

Unduly harsh? Maybe.

But Cotto is the middleweight champion, and if he wants to continue holding that distinction, he needs to prove it against the best challengers available.

That's Golovkin. Or even Canelo, who has never fought at middleweight but is one of the biggest names in the sport and provides a compelling challenge.

No more free passes.