Why Miguel Cotto Doesn't Deserve the Lineal Middleweight Championship
Miguel Cotto defends the lineal middleweight championship of the world on Saturday night against Daniel Geale at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. HBO will telecast the bout live.
But Cotto is far and away the worst lineal champion in all of boxing. Of the eight current boxers holding nine lineal championships in the sport at the moment, per the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board (Floyd Mayweather Jr. is both welterweight and junior middleweight champion), Cotto is the one who least deserves acclaim for it.
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Let’s get something out of the way right from the beginning. All the fighters who are lineal champions, including Cotto, became so by what they did inside a boxing ring. Unlike alphabet champions, the likes of the WBC, WBA, IBF and WBO, only losing inside the ring or a period of inactivity within the division can lead to the end of a lineal championship reign.
Cotto defeated Sergio Martinez in June 2014 to seize the middleweight throne. Martinez became champion in 2010 by knocking off Kelly Pavlik and held the title until Cotto stopped him in Round 10 of their fight last year.
But here’s the problem with Cotto’s middleweight championship: He is not really a middleweight. The former junior welterweight has yet to face opposition at the full divisional contract weight of 160 pounds, and he does not appear intent on ever doing so.
When Cotto faced Martinez last year, he forced the aging champion to come down to 159 pounds. While one pound probably didn’t make much of a difference in the 10-round shellacking, Cotto has waited a full year to defend his title against Geale.
And you guessed it, the contracted weight for the Geale fight is 157 pounds.
None of those things are necessarily an indictment of Cotto on their own. Catchweights in boxing are nothing new and will continue to happen so long as star fighters in any given promotion continue to feel they must get every single advantage they can possibly muster.
But Cotto’s case is also plagued by the way he won the title in the first place as well as what he’s done with it since.
He should be commended for the risk he took fighting Martinez last year. There was no reason before the fight that should have given anyone a strong belief that Cotto was going to do what he did against the longtime middleweight champion.
Cotto was the smaller man moving up to face a bigger, stronger and more athletic southpaw who told Bleacher Report he had every intention of knocking the Puerto Rican out.
But in hindsight, Martinez, age 39 at the time, was damaged goods.
His previously injured knee seemed shaky from the very start of the bout. Cotto took full advantage of it, landing powerful shots to have him reeling right from the start, and then systematically destroyed Martinez over the next nine rounds of the fight.
The one who takes risks gets rewards. Had Cotto calculated wrong, it’s likely Martinez would have been the victor, but instead Cotto came away the lineal middleweight champion of the world.
Good for him.
But since that fight, he’s made a mockery of perhaps the second-most celebrated boxing title in the entire world (behind heavyweight).
According to ESPN.com’s Dan Rafael, Cotto stalled talks long enough earlier this year to make fellow megastar Saul "Canelo" Alvarez seek other options. Alvarez ultimately ended up facing and defeating brawler James Kirkland in May to stay busy.
Meanwhile, Cotto remained inactive.
And instead of facing the clear top middleweight contender in the world, WBA champion Gennady Golovkin, Cotto chose instead to face Geale, a former middleweight belt holder Golovkin knocked out last year in just three rounds.
Cotto’s comments as of late have only made things worse. According to BoxingScene.com’s Jordan Moskowitz, Cotto is not in a hurry to face Golovkin anytime soon, and he doesn’t seem in a hurry to face Alvarez in a consolation bout either.
None of these things alone would make him the worst example of a lineal champion in boxing, but all of them together indicate the future Hall of Famer doesn’t deserve the acclaim usually reserved for such titleholders.
Yes, Cotto is the lineal middleweight champion of the world. Yes, he will likely remain so until someone defeats him in the ring, or he decides to retire.
These two things are true and fine.
But Cotto won’t really deserve his lineal middleweight championship until he faces and defeats a top middleweight contender who is not old and injured like Martinez and not forced to fight under the middleweight limit of 160 pounds.
That doesn’t appear to be happening anytime soon.
Note: Kelsey McCarson is a member of the TBRB.
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