By Kevin Iole, Yahoo! Sports
Miguel Cotto came to work Wednesday wearing a natty light-brown suit, a crisply starched pale blue dress shirt and a perfectly knotted tie. He would have fit in perfectly had he been trudging along Wall Street with a briefcase in hand.
Instead, he found himself in the Bronx addressing a small army of reporters at Yankee Stadium about his fight for the World Boxing Association super welterweight title with Yuri Foreman on Saturday.
Cotto will fight Foreman in a ring that will sit in right-center field, only a few strides away from the Yankees’ Monument Park, where the legends who helped make the Yankees into baseball’s most storied franchise are honored. And he’ll fight, whether he will admit it publicly or not, for his very survival as a boxer.
Coming off devastating and punishing losses to Antonio Margarito and Manny Pacquiao, Cotto has much to prove. Even his promoter, Top Rank’s Bob Arum, concedes as much.
“Once you start losing fights on a regular basis, your marketability suffers,” Arum said. “I have seen everything in boxing. One thing you see very often is that a guy takes beatings and he’s never the same. Now, on the other hand, I’ve seen fighters who take beatings and they’re refreshed and better than ever. But the former is more prevalent than the latter.”
The possibility exists that Cotto will never be the same. His trainer for the Pacquiao fight, Joe Santiago, did him a terrible disservice by failing to stop the fight when it was clear Cotto couldn’t win. Cotto was hopelessly behind and getting badly battered, yet round after round, Santiago kept sending him back out to fight.
For his son’s sake, as well as for the sake of the thousands of fans around the world who have worshipped him, hopefully Cotto won’t overstay his welcome.
This is not a sport for a long goodbye.
You can Read the full complete article here.
All Photos by Mike Stobe/Getty Images
