BOXING:Cotto against Mayweather

By Dan Ambrose: It’s great the way that WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto’s former promoter Bob Arum was able to keep Cotto winning in the last couple of years after he took a major beating against Manny Pacquiao. Arum helped Cotto get an easy title against one of his Top Rank stable fighters without any power and a bum right knee in Yuri Foreman. But it looks like the easy ride is over this Saturday night when Cotto faces his first real test in three years against undefeated Floyd Mayweather Jr. at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. Cotto has got some really serious physical disadvantages working against him in this fight with his lack of height, reach and hand speed in comparison to Mayweather. Floyd, 5’8″, is a little taller than the 5’7″ Cotto, with a five inch reach advantage and Cotto can’t even begin to match the blazing fast hand speed that Mayweather has going for him. There’s just no comparison. Just being shorter and with a shorter reach will be enough for Cotto to get blasted around the ring on Saturday night. But when you add to that the fact that the fact that Cotto is a lot slower, it’s going to be massacre. I don’t mind seeing a good massacre every now and then when it’s good for the sport, and I think this one is. When you get champions like Cotto taking on fighters like physically beaten up Antonio Margarito and a way his best 38-year-old Richardo Mayorga instead of the young lions like Erislandy Lara and Vanes Martirosyan, then it’s good that someone like Mayweather comes along to put things in the proper place by knocking Cotto off his WBA perch and letting the younger, bigger guys get a crack at the belt once Mayweather vacates it. It’s about time that one of the good junior middleweights get a shot at the World Boxing Association title instead of having Cotto face beaten up, old or physically dinged up fighters.