It has become something of a New York City tradition: Miguel Cotto fights before 20,000 fans at Madison Square Garden on the second Saturday of June, and then marches, in triumph, with a couple of million admirers down Fifth Avenue the following Sunday.
It has happened three years out of the last four and it will happen, at least in part, again this Saturday when Cotto, a former two-time welterweight champion and probably the most popular Puerto Rican-born athlete in New York after Jorge Posada and Carlos Beltran, faces Joshua Clottey of Ghana in a 12-round welterweight bout.
Whether Cotto (33-1, 27 KOs) will be up to marching down Fifth Avenue as one of the star’s of the city’s annual Puerto Rican Day Parade depends entirely on how deep a scar the only blemish on his record – an 11th-round TKO loss to Antonio Margarito last July — left on his body and mind.
Plus, there is the added burden of having to adjust to a new trainer; Cotto and his uncle and longtime trainer, Evangelista Cotto, parted a few months ago after a personal dispute escalated into a training camp fistfight.
Clottey, in fact, raised the possibility that if Cotto is put under the same kind of pressure Margarito administered, he might well achieve the same results.
“I think if I go in there and beat him that he will have trouble getting back to the fight,” said Clottey (35-2, 20 KOs). ” I definitely think he won’t come to fight again.”
They will never do a reality series on his life but the soft-spoken Cotto is the closest we have to a home-grown boxing hero these days. Posada and Beltran are fans and both will be at the fight, along with a number of their Mets and Yankees teammates.
They will be as curious as anyone to see if Cotto has indeed shrugged off the loss to Margarito, as he claims. If true, Cotto’s psychological recovery was no doubt helped by the unspoken suspicion that Margarito might have used “loaded” gloves in their fight, an offense he was found guilty of attempting before his fight against Shane Mosley, when a California commission inspector discovered a plaster-like substance in his handwraps. Margarito’s boxing license has since been revoked.
“I can’t really talk about it because we don’t know what happened,” Cotto said. “I learned a lot from the first loss of my career and everybody is going to see that against Clottey.”
At 28, Cotto’s career is at a definite crossroads. Although for a five-month period of 2007, covering impressive wins over Zab Judah and Mosley, he was mentioned in every discussion of boxing’s best all-around performers, the loss to Margarito derailed grand plans for big-money showdowns against Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao.
A loss to Clottey, who, like Cotto, was also beaten by Margarito, would demote him from one of the Grand Marshals of the Puerto Rican Day Parade, an honor bestowed on him two years ago, to just another onlooker.
