By Cliff Rold

Oscar De La Hoya is calling it a disgrace .

Miguel Cotto is going to call it extra cash in his pocket.

Everyone else shouldn’t give a damn.

In a fight that might be struggling to generate the box office it needs to cover costs, the WBC’s ruling Tuesday that they are stripping Cotto over an issue of sanctioning fees and step aside fees to Gennady Golovkin made headlines. It’s giving everyone something to talk about and that can’t be a bad thing. That one of the promoters can holler ‘disgrace!’ is fine. It might mean some venom at the final pre-fight press conference Wednesday.

ESPN began extended coverage of the fight Tuesday. They’ll have plenty of footage if that happens, as will this site, Ring’s site, Sweet Science, Yahoo, USA Today, and just about every other outlet covering the event. It adds a little extra personality to a fight between two exciting guys in the ring who don’t have much personality between them. 

Here’s the reality of the situation.

Nothing of substance really changed.

The WBC belt is still up for grabs. They’ve announced Alvarez can win the now vacant title if he gets past Cotto. Cotto is, with or without the WBC belt, history’s Middleweight champion tracing to the Bernard Hopkins’ unification of the division. If Alvarez wins, he gets the strap, will still walk away with the 160 lb. lineage intact, and has a mandatory looming with Gennady Golovkin.

In other words, this changes nothing about the fight itself. If one was excited to see Cotto-Alvarez and the WBC title was part of that excitement, that’s still there. Every other reason to like the fight is still there too: old lion versus young, Mexico versus Puerto Rico, and so on.

The only thing that changes with the stripping of Cotto, and Cotto’s not paying what the WBC asked in fees, is that it reveals what was painfully obvious all along.

Miguel Cotto was probably never going to be on board with facing Golovkin. By letting himself be stripped, he keeps more money this weekend and has no further obligations to the organization or its mandatory positioning of Golovkin (who already has the WBA and IBF straps). It confirms that there was never a real process of elimination going on at middleweight.

HBO, and the promoters of the fighters involved, have tried to treat last month’s Golovkin-David Lemieux and this month’s Cotto-Alvarez fights as a sort of unofficial tournament in the division. It never really was. The whole notion was smoke and mirrors. The HBO unification tournament at middleweight in 2001 was the real deal. All four fighters committed to facing each other before it got started. There was paper in place.

Here, in place of paper here, there was prayer. That prayer really starts and ends with Alvarez. 

Alvarez against the Golovkin-Lemieux winner has always been possible. There will be much banter about catch weights and money if it gets that far. It’s always seemed far more likely than Cotto facing that winner, especially since its now Golovkin.

That makes some sense. Both Cotto and Alvarez would be heavy underdogs to Golovkin. Their situations are different. At only 25, Alvarez has time to rebuild from a loss and make more money later. He could also win, and then dump, the WBC belt and claim Golovkin isn’t respecting him as the ‘A-side’ or some other social media feeding gibberish.

Cotto, now 35, has never really wanted to fight middleweights at all. In what will be his third start in the class, he is having his third straight catchweight fight. It was to be his second defense of the WBC title, and still is his second of the lineal, mandating a limit below 160 lbs. Why would anyone think he wants to tangle with a middleweight like Golovkin as he approaches 36? There are easier fights to win, less punishment to take, and more career extension anywhere else.

It never made sense to call this a tournament, unofficial or otherwise. It was always two fights that might lead to another one but would probably just end with Golovkin getting full recognition as WBC titlist while Cotto and Alvarez do something else next.

If the fight this weekend is good enough, next might be a rematch of Cotto-Alvarez with the WBC no longer involved at all.

Or maybe the WBC breaks out one of their unofficial but super special diamond belts for that one.

Cliff Rold is the Managing Editor of BoxingScene, a founding member of the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board, and a member the Yahoo Pound for Pound voting panel, and the Boxing Writers Association of America.  He can be reached at roldboxing@hotmail.com