By Bart Barry-
Saturday at Mandalay Bay, Puerto Rican middleweight champion Miguel Cotto will swap blows with Mexican junior middleweight Saul “Canelo” Alvarez in a main event that should mark 2015’s best pay-per-view match. The broadcast will happen on pay-HBO, a network whose commentators surely will invoke, in tones alternately awestruck and threatening, the name of the Kazakh fighter who holds the HBO middleweight title, reminding viewers Canelo-Cotto happens at a catchweight, 155 pounds, and that its unlucky winner will have fewer than two weeks to savor his victory before a Mexican sanctioning organization promises to strip that fighter of its belt and award the garish green tchotchke to HBO’s undisputed middleweight champion – as if the WBC ever would strip Canelo Alvarez.
The best outcome for aficionados is a Saturday match so even, violent, and robust, fans rise in a single, stentorian voice to demand a Cinco de Mayo rematch. The best outcome for HBO’s champion and at least one of his copromoters, of course, is that one man, probably Canelo, wins lopsidedly and then, in hotblood, gets goaded by Max to say he wants to fight the HBO middleweight champion next.
Among the many things about Latino prizefighters that should enchant aficionados, there’s this: An apparent obliviousness of American media manias. A man like Saul Alvarez lives in a selfsufficient country where, whatever his handlers might say when a contract gets signed, he doesn’t think about HBO or the opinions of its commentary crew or, best of all, its current exuberance for fighters from the former Soviet Union. However it gets broadcasted, the Saturday match between Alvarez and Cotto is not an elimination bout for a chance to face HBO’s middleweight champion; Canelo-Cotto is a prizefight in which each man will face an opponent many, many times better than anyone the HBO middleweight champion of the world has fought.
The winner of Canelo-Cotto, HBO tells us in a chorus with its champion’s official promoter, will have some arbitrarily chosen span of time before the winner has to declare he will face HBO’s middleweight champion or else risk ongoing banishment from HBO’s Gatti List and Fight Game List. Banishment from both lists ripples banishments across social media as a force multiplier, including possible banishments from the ESPN list, Pinterest, a number of influential Twitter polls, and a carefully chosen plethora of whatever apps teenage girls mindlessly refresh at Starbucks. The stakes aren’t merely high for the Mexican and the Puerto Rican, in other words: They’re nigh insurmountable.
Fortunately for both Canelo and Cotto, neither of them cares a jot for the subjective hierarchies that consume an everdwindling number of impoverished wouldbe aficionados who instead came of age in the List Era . . .
We now interrupt this hopeless column to hear from Saturday’s promoter and participants:
“Miguel, you have had an illustrious career, you are one of the marquee names in Puerto Rican fight history, you have fought a number of great fighters, you are one of my favorite fighters – one of the fighters I most enjoy hearing myself talk about, a fighter I can say dynamic, crushing, extraordinary, phenomenal things about – you are a Puerto Rican and a champion, Miguel, how do you feel about our certainty you will lose to the HBO middleweight champion, a man who began his career 20 pounds heavier than you began yours, if ever you find within yourself a fraction the courage required to fight him?”
“Miguel Cotto does not care about HBO middleweight champion.”
“Canelo, when people like me think about Mexican fighters, we think of names like Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, Salvador Sanchez, Pancho Villa, Finito Lopez, the Aztec emperor Cuauhtémoc, Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos – I can go on but I won’t because what I want to know, and what I think we’ve convinced others they want us to know, is this: Do you have trouble sleeping at night when you think about agreeing in principle to fight the HBO middleweight champion within 15 days of your possible victory over Miguel Cotto?”
“No, no, para nada. Lo que los comentaristas de HBO dicen sobre su campeón no me importa. Vivo en México, y ni sé quienes son – ni quien eres tú.”
. . . when mankind’s understandable if wholly absurd desire to impose order on an unpredictable and violent world married itself to a simplified form of written expression, the list, that required no transitional sentences, no spiraling thoughts, and considerably less craft than its predecessor forms.
Saturday’s match is not likely to disappoint. Canelo is best when his adversary attacks him, and Cotto knows he is best when attacking intelligently, stepping forward in an offensive flow. What both Cotto and Coach Freddie know is that if the match becomes a contest of offensive improvisation, where each man’s conditioning allows him to engage the other intelligently and at a comfortable pace, Cotto will have more depths from which to fetch, more opponent tricks he’s solved, more tricks he’s introduced to opponents, all of it, than Canelo will have. It’s not experience’s quantity so much as its quality – the fencer’s jab Cotto used against Shane Mosley in 2007, as an example, is an offensive adaptation of which Canelo, in 47 prizefights, has yet to prove himself capable. All other likely developments favor Canelo. He is younger, bigger, more physical, and most importantly, possessed of a right uppercut onto which Cotto will almost certainly drop himself.
This match will fulfill violent expectations – with Cotto lasting slightly longer than his detractors expect but considerably shorter than his supporters hope. I’ll take Canelo, TKO-10.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
