Canelo Alvarez is fighting James Kirkland on May 9, and Miguel Cotto is facing Daniel Geale on June 6, yet all the talk regarding Alvarez and Cotto is a fight down the line against one another. Perhaps that's because Alvarez and Cotto themselves are treating their upcoming opponents as afterthoughts.
Kirkland is 32-1-0 with 28 knockouts, but when asked about upcoming fights Alvarez is asked mostly about Cotto, whom he tried to work out a deal with for this summer. "The fight with Miguel Cotto will come in time. It's a natural fight," Canelo said via ESPN Deportes. "It may be in September or later, but I'm sure that at some point it will because it is inevitable."
For that to happen, a lot of things must be set in motion. First, Alvarez must take care of business vs. Kirkland. Then Cotto must defeat Geale, a natural middleweight and former champion, in June. At the same time, Cotto and Roc Nation have to work out a step-aside deal with Gennady Golovkin, the undefeated WBA and IBO middleweight champion and mandatory challenger for Cotto's crown. That will not be as easy as some might think.
"We've been approached by Roc Nation already to work something out with Cotto. So it just depends on if there's something acceptable to work out," Golovkin promoter Tom Loeffler said.
"The first thing would have to be that whoever wins the fight would have to guarantee to fight him [Golovkin], which so far they haven't. The second thing, there would have to be significant financial compensation to Gennady, because he put himself in the position to fight [Marco Antonio] Rubio and without that it wouldn't make any sense."
For now, both Cotto and Alvarez should focus on their upcoming opponents, neither of whom are pushovers.
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