The gloves officially came off at the Gennady Golovkin-David Lemieux press conference leading up to an exciting night of action on Oct. 17 as HBO pay-per-view fight ($59.95 HD) presents Golovkin-Lemieux at Madison Square Garden in a middleweight unification that will be held at the full middleweight limit of 160-pounds.
Now, the gloves didn’t come off between the two fighters at all in fact. On Tuesday, Lemieux, who holds the IBF middleweight title, branded the WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto as “scared” for forcing his opponents to fight at catch-weights to gain an unfair advantage.
Cotto doesn’t seem to care as he will fight Saul “Canelo” Alvarez in a highly-anticipated mega-fight on Nov. 21 from the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino also on HBO pay-per-view, but that didn’t stop Lemieux from releasing the beast inside of him.
“Cotto shouldn’t be fighting at middleweight,” Lemieux said. “If you want to fight at middleweight, make 160. You’re a middleweight. Don’t be fighting at catch-weights. It’s middleweight. You want to be at 155-154 – you’re scared.”
Again, Cotto could care less about what others think, and that’s what makes him such a likable fighter. Sure, some people see Cotto’s demeanor as divisive – the same can be said about presidential candidate Donald Trump – but Cotto’s job is to get in that ring, beat people up, and get paid for it.
As a future Hall of Famer, I think he’s done a pretty solid job. Cotto knows he isn’t a true middleweight. After his fourth-round annihilation of a shot Daniel Geale, HBO’s Max Kellerman asked Cotto if he considered himself to be a middleweight. Cotto left him with a short, precise response.
“My weight yesterday was 153.6-pounds. Do you think I’m a middleweight?” Cotto asked Kellerman.
“Doesn’t sound like it,” Kellerman replied.
“I’m not,” Cotto added.
Without mentioning him by name, Golovkin added that he wants to take out whoever is in possession of the WBC title – that being Cotto.
“Who is the best at 160? My focus is 160, the WBC champion at 160.”
Will Cotto ever fight at 160? It’s not likely. Will he fight Gennady Golovkin? We’ll wait and see.
