IN CELEBRATION OF MIGUEALA COTTO
“The fans don’t fully understand what it means to be a fighter,” Miguel Cotto once said. “They see the fight, and most don’t understand even that. But even fewer understand the sacrifices that a fighter must make, the pain he suffers, just to get to the fight. For myself, I’m not a real big fan of boxing. I just enjoy boxing when I’m boxing.”
MIGUEL COTTO entered his dressing room at Barclays Center on June 6, 2015, at 8.25pm. He was casually dressed, wearing faded blue jeans, a well-worn gray T-shirt, a blue leather jacket, and loafers with no socks. There was a time when winning a world championship was boxing’s equivalent of a mobster becoming a made man. No more. In an era characterised by multiple sanctioning bodies and more than a hundred world “champions” at any point in time, only a handful of fighters matter to the public.
Miguel Cotto mattered. His journey through boxing began in 1992. “I was a chubby child,” he later recalled. “I weighed 162 pounds at age eleven. My sport was to sit in front of the TV and eat. I started boxing to lose weight and
