The sight of Miguel Cotto, Alfonso Gomez and Kermit Cintron yesterday helped clear the lingering stench of Saturday night’s boring heavyweight unification match at the Garden.
It was good to see fighters who aren’t afraid to fight.
Cotto, Gomez and Cintron were in lower Manhattan to announce an April 12 card in Atlantic City that promises to be more entertaining than the snooze-fest Wladimir Klitschko and Sultan Ibragimov delivered.
Cotto (31-0, 25 KOs) will defend his WBA welterweight championship against Gomez (18-3-2, 8 KOs), while Cintron (29-1, 22 KOs), the IBF welterweight champ, will attempt to avenge his only loss in a rematch with Antonio Margarito. HBO will televise.
Cotto is coming off an impressive 2007 in which he won three fights, including Garden victories over Zab Judah and Shane Mosley. He’ll be a heavy favorite over Gomez, a former star of the Contender television series who legitimized his career with a seventh-round knockout of Arturo Gatti last July.
“Alfonso is always ready for anything,” said Jeff Wald, Gomez’s promoter. “He’s a mentally very, very tough kid. The one thing I learned about spending a lot of time around Sugar Ray Leonard, Mike Tyson and George Foreman is that the mental part of this is as important as anything else.”
Nonetheless, Cotto is establishing himself as one of the best pound-for-pound boxers on the planet, and eventually will hunt down a mega-fight with Floyd Mayweather Jr. should both keep winning.
“I don’t care if I’m the favorite or not,” Cotto said. “All I know is that I’m coming to win. … I’m going out of the ring the same way I came up into the ring: as the world champion.”
Cintron suffered a fifth-round TKO loss to Margarito in 2005, but has since been trained by Emanuel Steward.
“I’m a different fighter since that loss,” said Cintron, who has five straight wins. “I’ve gotten a lot of the negative out of my life. I’m around the right people now.
“Having Emanuel Steward as a trainer is what I needed in my career. You see the difference in me when I’m fighting.”