LAS VEGAS - Bob Arum thinks Miguel Cotto understands how the world is looking at him, but he does not.
Yesterday, during a press conference called to hype Saturday night’s welterweight title fight between Cotto and the best fighter in the world, Manny Pacquiao, the promoter of both men stood at a podium a few feet from Cotto and tried to explain the situation.
“Psychologically, in this fight, he is not the star,” Arum said of Cotto, the once defeated WBO welterweight champion he has promoted since he first turned professional nine years ago. “He knows it and I know it. But Miguel Cotto, as Miguel will attest, is the biggest obstacle in Manny’s path.”
Cotto sat stone silent as Arum spoke, but his face spoke for him. It was like a dark cloud had passed over a summer picnic.
In Cotto’s mind he is more than an obstacle for any man he faces. More than a steppingstone between Pacquiao and the biggest fight in boxing, a match with Floyd Mayweather Jr. that is already being talked about. More than they think he is.
Certainly, he knows it is Manny Pacquiao’s picture on the cover of the Asia edition of Time magazine not his. It is Pacquiao who is being written about on the front page of the Sunday New York Times [NYT], not him. It is Pacquiao’s world until Saturday night. Then, if they have forgotten who he is, he believes he will remind them. Harshly.
“What they say and what they do does not concern me,” Cotto said. “They know what they have in front of him. He better be focused on what they will have in front of him in Miguel Cotto.”
Although he has lost only once in 35 fights and is 14-1 in world title bouts with 11 knockouts, Cotto knows how much of the boxing world looks at him. They see him the way his promoter did yesterday. Like he’s yesterday’s news.
Pacquiao is the heavy favorite and his trainer, Freddie Roach, is predicting a knockout, the only matter in question in his mind is whether it will be sooner or later. Cotto remains stoic through all this, but neither blind nor deaf. When WBC executive Mauricio Sulaiman stood holding a diamond-studded trophy belt that will be presented to the winner even though this is a fight for the WBO welterweight title, Cotto watched with dead eyes as Sulaiman first handed the belt to Pacquiao, who put it in front of Roach as if there is no question that is its final resting place.
“It doesn’t matter if the people want me to win or not,” Cotto said later. “It is just a fight and I have worked to win it so we will see.”
He is asked if he feels better and stronger than before his last fight, a tough one against Joshua Clottey in which he won the WBO title, but in which he seemed tentative and tired in the late rounds. With blood streaming from a bad cut over his left eye, he was often retreating, yet found a way to win.
But it was the kind of win that convinced his critics that he has not yet recovered from the terrible beating he took from Antonio Margarito a year ago, a beating that left him not only bruised and bloodied, but down on one knee without having been hit in the 11th round, forcing the fight to be stopped.
In fairness, he’d been hit plenty by then and so there are doubts now whether he will ever recover from the damage of that night. He looked tentative in his first fight back and not much different at times against Clottey and now he is facing the new star of boxing and understands what is at stake.
“Forget about Freddie Roach,” Cotto said. “He can only train Manny the best he can. He may say and think Manny will knock me out, but at the end of the day, it is just Manny and Miguel Cotto in the ring. It’s really not important to me what the boxing world wants to see.
“Once I beat Manny Pacquiao they can continue their plans and do what they want but I am not going home without winning this fight.”
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Source: http://news.bostonherald.com/sports/columnists/view.bg?&articleid=1211337&format=&page=1&listingType=sco#articleFull
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