Round by Round: Weekly Boxing Notes

Too Vicious
↵Note to self: If your sparring partner is beating you up on a regular basis, then by all means fire his ass and get a new sparring partner. This is evidently the tack chosen by Oscar De La Hoya with Golden Boy stable-mate (or employee, depending on how you think about it), Vicious Victor Ortiz. ↵↵The word is that the junior welter Ortiz was giving De La Hoya such beatings in training that Oscar’s camp had to fire him and hire Venezuelan junior lightweight Edwin Valero.↵

↵↵Opting for the lighter man certainly sounds like an Oscar move, but this information should be taken with at least a few grains of salt in that it seems like a major source for the story is Freddie Roach, a one-time De La Hoya trainer who is training Manny Pacquiao to fight Oscar on December 7th. ↵

↵↵How Roach would know the details of what’s going on in Oscar’s camp is a mystery, in that the 24/7 hasn’t even started yet. No doubt he’s been hearing the same rumors that everyone else was and decided to put it out there on the record. As for the response from Golden Boy, when asked about the story, CEO Ricahrd Schaefer just laughed. ↵

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↵↵Cotto/Berto No Go
↵There were little birds all over the place this week twittering that a Miguel Cotto/Andre Berto fight for February was a real possibility. Coming on the heels of the news that a once-doubtful Tony Margarito/Shane Mosley fight is still in negotiations, suddenly it seemed like 2009 was shaping up to be the year that we all died and went to welterweight heaven.↵

↵↵Now it looks like Cotto/Berto is not going to happen, and for the most annoying of reasons -- the meddling of the WBC. Berto is the current WBC champ at 147, taking over for the retired Floyd Mayweather by winning a fight for Floyd’s vacated belt over Miki Rodriguez in June. The WBC is insisting that Berto defend his belt against their mandatory contender, Luis Collazo, which according to Cotto’s promoter, Bob Arum, is going to scotch the possibility of Cotto/Berto in February.↵

↵↵It’s always painful when the alphabet organizations get in the way of a good fight, but in this instance, it may be for the best all around, especially for Berto. To this boxing fan’s eyes, even after his respectable handling of Stevie Forbes, Berto is simply not ready for the likes of Cotto and could take a demoralizing beating, which would leave him not only without a title but with a serious loss of momentum in his young career. Collazo, a tough son of a gun from Brooklyn who once took Ricky Hatton to the wall, is more Berto’s speed right now, exactly the type of bout that he needs to gain precious experience as he moves towards big-money bouts with the big names out there.↵

↵↵That said, I confess that the idea of a Cotto/Berto scrap in February had me salivating and I’m sorry to see it go. Let’s just hope Margs/Mosley gets made and we at least get a little slice of welterweight heaven in early ‘09.↵

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