By Miguel Rivera
Former four division world champion Miguel Cotto is still pretty steamed at the World Boxing Council after the two sides had a heated dispute in the days leading up to the Puerto Rican star's defense of the WBC middleweight title against Saul 'Canelo' Alvarez last November.
Cotto was ordered to make a mandatory defense against Gennady 'GGG' Golovkin. He found the situation absurd, because Golovkin was already a world champion of three other sanctioning bodies (WBA/IBO/IBF) and there were several top contenders under the WBC who were waiting for their shot at the belt.
To go forward with Canelo, which at the time was second biggest fight in the sport next to Mayweather-Pacquiao, the Puerto Rican star was forced to enter a step-aside deal with Golovkin which ran a reported sum of $800,000. When the WBC pressed him to pay an additional $300,000 as a sanctioning fee for the bout with Canelo, Cotto say he was finally fed up and vacated the title.
Canelo would end up decisioning Cotto over the twelve rounds for the vacant WBC championship.
A few weeks ago, Canelo found himself in a similar situation when the WBC was pressing him to reach an agreement with Golovkin or the parties would have to go forward with a purse bid on May 24.
The Mexican star issued a statement and said he was unhappy with their tight deadline, and answered the sanctioning body by vacating the title. A few hours after making that decision, the WBC named Golovkin as their new middleweight champion.
Cotto called it a "smart move" by Canelo.
"Canelo is an intelligent person and his (recent) action says a lot about him. I did the same thing for our fight in November under the same pressures, and now he did [the same thing] in a very intelligent way," Cotto told El Vocero.
"Here it is what we mentioned last November. The greed and ambitions of these global organizations, who want to create six champions in every division so they can enjoy a sanctioning fee from every champion. Their actions have made boxing lose credibility. Because of this, boxing has diminished a lot and so have the quality of title fights, and this has allowed sports like the UFC [to rise up] in these times."
"Every sport most in the world has a single champion. This is how you should run sports. Each division should have their champion and should have challengers who want to be champions. For a challenger who wants to be champion you have to beat the champion. There is nothing attractive or beautiful in a scenario where each division has six different champions. There is only one reason for this, for the sanctioning bodies to collect a fee for each fight. Greed has destroyed the sport."
"Mauricio put a price on the relationship he had with us for years. Mauricio thought as a businessman, not as a sensible person. With their five senses in place, he should have understood our position to save $1.1 million because we had already been told to pay $800 thousand to Golovkin. Because of WBC's greed, they wanted to charge a sanctioning fee when we had already paid $800 thousand."
