Interview with Miguel Cotto

It’s been a while since we heard of Miguel Cotto, Kevin Lole of Yahoo sports recently did a telephone interview with the Puerto Rican.

In his first wide-ranging interview with an English-speaking media outlet since the fight, Cotto said the loss has not haunted him and vowed to turn the outcome around. He praised Margarito for his performance and said he wasn’t surprised by how good Margarito turned out to be, but also that he still believes he’s the better fighter.

Margarito was relentless and essentially walked Cotto down. He managed to walk through Cotto’s shots to the head and finally stopped the Puerto Rican star with a vicious assault.

Cotto was circling almost from the beginning of the fight and rarely stopped, a move that has been roundly criticized. Cotto wouldn’t accept criticism of his strategy, though he realized he opened himself to it by losing.

“Part of boxing is winning and part of it is losing,” Cotto said. “When you win, you might have made a lot of mistakes, but no one asks you about it because you won. When you lose, maybe you only might make a smaller number of mistakes, but because you lose, that’s all that you hear about. It’s OK. I don’t want to say I had the wrong strategy. I tried to do the best I could. If you saw the fight, the first five, six or seven rounds, I think Cotto was looking pretty good.”

Margarito, though, didn’t wilt from those shots as so many Cotto opponents had previously. Part of the reason is the vast majority of Cotto’s landed punches were landed to the head and not to the midsection, where they tend to take the starch out of a fighter quickest.

Cotto wouldn’t say exactly how, but he said Margarito was making it difficult for him to land to the body.

“Believe me when I tell you, I tried, but it was impossible,” Cotto said. “Margarito was doing things that made it impossible for me to do that. I wanted to, but I could not.”

The loss was Cotto’s first since a 17-7 defeat to Muhammad Abdullaev in the first round of the 139-pound class of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia.

He said it was difficult for him to take in the hours immediately following the fight, but said he was back to normal the next day. And though he appeared to take a physical beating in the bout, he said he didn’t feel its affects any longer than any other fight.

Other than swelling to his eye and face, which he normally hasn’t had, Cotto said the pain from the fight went away in three weeks to a month, which is about the same as most of his other fights.

“I was disappointed, I guess that’s the word, because I felt like I could have won the fight, but I was fine other than that,” he said. “I’m excited about getting back to it.”

Top Rank plans to put him back into the ring sometime in the first quarter of next year and then put him into a rematch with Margarito in the summer.

In typical Cotto fashion, he said he didn’t care who he fought or where. He said even though he was angered by MGM Grand officials not allowing his children in to a prefight news conference, he’d even fight again in Las Vegas if Top Rank made a deal there.

There are few more prideful fighters than Cotto, however, and it’s likely that his next opponent will feel his wrath over everything that went wrong in July.

He laughed at the suggestion – “I’m a professional and I’m just going to come out to win no matter who I’m fighting,” he insisted – but let’s just say there probably won’t be a line of volunteers outside promoter Bob Arum’s door looking to be in the opposite corner for Cotto’s return.

On the opposite side of the country, Margarito is finally getting the star treatment, and everyone and his brother (except, of course, super welterweight Oscar De La Hoya, who apparently decided that fighting a welterweight would be too tough and went out and found the baddest-ass lightweight he could find for a December match) wants to face him.

Cotto has no problem with any of that, but you just get a sense that he is thinking to a time nine months or so from now when those roles are reversed.

“When you win the fights and do your job the way you are supposed to, these are the kinds of things that happen,” Cotto said. “When you don’t win, you have to figure it out and come back and try it again.”