By Chris Robinson
In a recent article, BoxingScene.com ran a story stating that respected Las Vegas referee Kenny Bayless was the leading candidate to officiate the May 5th super fight between undefeated superstar Floyd Mayweather Jr. and WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto.
Bayless is actually familiar with both fighters, having been in the ring during Cotto’s only two professional losses as well as Mayweather’s May 2010 victory over Shane Mosley, with all three fights having taken place at the MGM Grand Garden Arena.
Cotto’s defeats at the hands of Antonio Margarito in July of 2008 and Manny Pacquiao in November of 2009 weren’t your ordinary kind of setbacks.
Against Margarito, Cotto had great success over the first half of the fight, catching his Tijuana foil with sharp punches from a variety of angles and building up a noticeable lead. But Margarito’s pressure turned the tide of the fight and the action reached a full tilt in the eleventh round as a fading Cotto was smothered by non-stop punching as he twice took a knee while his trainer and Uncle Evangelista threw in the towel moments later.
Cotto fought fire with fire in the opening frames of his bout with Pacquiao, trading fierce shots in closed quarters with the Filipino hero, yet he would ultimately pay for such tactics as he was dropped in the third and fourth rounds. Cotto’s face became a bloody mask as Pacquiao stalked him down in the following rounds, with Bayless jumping in to end the action with just fifty-five seconds left in the fight.
Asked what it was like during the chaos of those two bouts, Bayless revealed that a fighter’s safety is always his concern when things begin to get heated.
“We’re mindful of several things that can come into play,” Bayless would state during our conversation on Sunday evening. “The key thing is how much punishment a fighter is taking, and if he is absorbing a lot of punishment, safety becomes number one for us. If it’s a very grueling or demanding fight and a fighter is just starting to absorb too many punches and it looks like there’s no way he can strike a comeback in any way, we’re just going to have to stop it and that was pretty much the case in the Margarito and Pacquiao fights.”
Bayless had to stay on top of things the last time he oversaw a Mayweather bout as well, as Floyd was caught with a serious right hand from Mosley in the second round of their contest that momentarily had him dazed. In Mosley’s only moments of success in the bout, he caught Mayweather with a few decent shots and had the crowd in the building roaring.
And while Mayweather would regroup and go on to dominate the fight from that point forward, Bayless admits that he was slightly taken aback during that second round.
“It was surprising to me that Mosley had caught him that early in the fight,” Bayless reflected. “We’re always conscious of any and everything that can happen but I just wasn’t expecting it to happen so soon in the fight, for either fighter to get hit to the point where it rocked him or shook him up. At that point, it made me focus in a little harder, because when a fighter gets hurt, then you are expecting the next punch might take him out. That wasn’t the case but it puts us more on guard as to what will happen.”
Bayless is presently enjoying some down time on the island of Puerto Rico and will be returning to Las Vegas on Wednesday, May 2nd. And despite discussing a Mayweather-Cotto fight with a professional tone, he can’t hide his enthusiasm towards being involved in such an event.
“A lot of people ask if I would be doing it,” said Bayless. “I get pretty pumped up when I get notification of fights of this caliber. It starts to prepare me on what I’m going to have to do."
Chris Robinson is based out of Las Vegas, Nevada. He can be reached at Trimond@aol.com