Yuri Foreman vs Miguel Cotto Result and Fight Recap
The sixth round of Yuri Foreman’s WBA junior middleweight championship bout against Miguel Cotto at Yankee Stadium on Saturday night offered everything fans could have hoped for coming into the fight. The taller, faster Foreman was moving and landing sharp, quick series of punches against Cotto. However, the challenger hardly seemed bothered by Foreman’s punches, brushing aside the soft blows to deliver harder, more telling shots. It was a round that highlighted the classic boxer versus brawler match-up that had been one of the key selling points to the fight.
However, the sixth round was a fleeting image in a night that quickly became strange and ultimately extremely disappointing. Foreman would slip and badly hurt his knee early in the seventh round, sapping him of his speed and lateral movement and making him a stationery target – essentially a sitting duck for the offensive assault of Cotto. Without the ability to move and being unable to keep Cotto at bay with the threat of a power punch, Foreman was in deep trouble and it was only a matter of time before the inevitable happened.
Foreman’s corner sensed the situation as well and attempted to save their fighter additional punishment. They threw in the towel in the eighth round as Foreman was in the process of getting battered by big shots from Cotto. However, New York boxing rules state that only the referee can stop a fight during a round, and Arthur Mercante Jr. refused to stop the bout. After a break, it was announced that the towel was not thrown in by a trainer but an “outside person” – a statement that would later be refuted by video evidence.
Mercante Jr. had asked Foreman if he wanted to continue and he wanted to give it a shot – Foreman was a game and willing fighter who was willing to try and fight through the pain to defend his belt on the biggest stage of his career. However, it was simply a matter of putting off what everyone knew would happen. It came one round later, as a huge left hook to Foreman’s body crumpled him to the ground. Even Mercante Jr. knew that it over at this point, waving off the bout and giving the TKO victory – and the title – to Cotto.
The post-fight analysis was as convoluted as the incident itself. There were conflicting feelings about how Mercante Jr. handled the corner “throwing in the towel” – some felt that it was the right move since Foreman hadn’t been hurt yet, while others believed that he should have respected the wishes of Foreman’s handlers and not sent a wounded fighter back out. Foreman and his manager even differed on why the slip happened. Murray Wilson blamed water from Cotto’s corner that had not properly been cleaned up (perhaps setting up the grounds for an appeal to change the fight to a “no contest”) while Foreman said that it was an old injury from a bicycle accident as a teenager, and that he slipped while attempting to slip a punch along the ropes.
It’s quite possible that the knee injury to Foreman only brought a more rapid end to a fight that was going Cotto’s way. Cotto won all but two rounds on all three judges’ scorecards, as he was able to show that he was not the “shot fighter” after recent losses to Antonio Margarito and Manny Pacquaio that many observers thought he might be. He needed to be active to have a chance against the faster Foreman, and he threw 329 punches in the fight compared to 281 for Foreman. In the end, Cotto’s power and aggression seemed to be too much for Foreman – even with two healthy knees.
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