Miguel Cotto Affirms Hall of Fame Credentials Despite Loss to Canelo

Miguel Cotto lost a Las Vegas prizefight early Sunday morning.

He was in against a talented foe 10 years younger while operating on the fringes of a weight class in which he’d frequently claimed he’d barely belonged and rarely felt comfortable.

Nevertheless, he was still on his feet after 36 minutes of competition, and even though the three scorecards deemed him a loser in all but six of a composite 36 rounds, it was hardly as if he’d been battered from pillar to post from opening bell to close.

He didn’t win. But he didn’t embarrass himself either.

And if his hasty exit from the post-fight interview scene was illustrative of a permanent departure from the occupation he’s held for 14 years, he’ll still leave with no less honor than he arrived.

In other words, if you thought he was Canastota-worthy going in, that perspective needn’t change.

In fact, when his swan song is compared to others whose credentials are without question, he comes off looking particularly exceptional.

Just a quick glance across a list of International Hall of Fame inductees reveals a laundry list of all-timers whose inglorious ends hardly justified their legendary reputations.

Mike Tyson, whose titillating run included exactly zero wins against in-prime Hall-worthy heavyweights, lost by stoppage in three of his final four fights—and was instantly enshrined five years later.

Arturo Gatti, also a stoppage loser in three of his last four fights, and also a winner over precisely no one whose credentials leap off the page—was also enshrined the second he became eligible.

And even Terry Norris, whose most remembered feat remains a 12-round whitewash of a past-vintage Sugar Ray Leonard, was given a plaque in 2005—seven years after ending with a three-fight skid.

So if your logic for questioning Cotto is that he’ll finish with an L instead of a W, you’re just wrong.

Frank Franklin II/Associated Press

The Puerto Rican’s affirmation was complete long before the Mandalay Bay came into view, probably more so around the time he shook off a brutal welterweight loss to Manny Pacquiao in 2009 and climbed back to grab a belt at 154 pounds—his third—with a TKO of a gimpy-legged Yuri Foreman.

He’d already defeated multi-belted guys with names such as Paulie Malignaggi, Zab Judah and Shane Mosley, but the mettle he showed with yet another reinvention exceeds that which many with higher reputations ever achieved.

He stopped perpetual troublemaker Ricardo Mayorga in defense No. 1 nine months later and then scored his most satisfying personal win with a tactical hammering of Antonio Margarito in December 2011.

History will record him as just a .500 fighter (three up, three down) from that point forward. But when you study the record and see the stretch-run foes were the Mayweathers, Sergio Martinezes and Saul Alvarezes—not the Kevin McBrides, Carlos Baldomirs and Dana Rosenblatts—of the world, it’s clear that the version of Cotto who's exiting in 2015 is not all that competitively diminished from the one who peaked years before.

He fought everyone. And even though he might have lost the ones that mattered the most, he won more than enough of the others to even the slate.

That’s the sort of career that deserves recognition, no matter how the story ends.