Miguel Cotto vs. Yoshihiro Kamegai – Results

Miguel Cotto vs. Yoshihiro Kamegai – Results

Miguel Cotto vs. Yoshihiro Kamegai – Results

Miguel Cotto vs. Yoshihiro Kamegai – Results

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In a truly ugly mismatch, former 4 division world champion Miguel Cotto (41-5, 33 KOs) beat Yoshihiro Kamegai (27-5-2, 24 KOs) by a terribly one-sided fight on Saturday night to win the World Boxing Organization 154lb tile in a fight televised by HBO at the StubHub Center in Carson, California.

The scores were 120-108, 118-110 and 119-109. Boxing News 24 scored the fight 120-108.

Kamegai, 34, was constantly plodding forward, taking head shots from the smaller 5’7” Cotto, who hit him the Japanese fighter at will in every round of the fight. The more competitive rounds were in the first 4 rounds. After that, Cotto was just teeing off at will against the very slow and weak Kamegai.

Cotto was catching Kamegai with left hooks and right hands in rounds 5-7 as he would walk straight up. There was no defense with Kamegai. He was just a tall punching bag with arms. Despite being taller than Cotto, Kamegai gave away his height and reach advantage by getting in close and throwing shots with nothing on them.

It was obvious that Kamegai would do better if he stood back and threw shots from medium distance, but he wouldn’t do that. I think the reason why Kamegai kept crowding Cotto all night was because he has such poor hand speed. When Kamegai was on the outside, Cotto could beat him to the punch with his faster hands.

The WBO had Kamegai ranked #6 coming into the fight. He looked so bad that it’s scary how a sanctioning body could have this poor of a fighter rated as high as they did. The WBO has their reasons for ranking Kamegai so highly, but the result was tonight’s horrendous mismatch. Kamegai looked like someone that should be ranked in the bottom 100, and not at No.6 by the WBO.

In the last half of the fight, Kamegai lost whatever power he had going into the fight. He stopped throwing punches, and he mostly just took shots.

Rounds 8 through 12 were totally one-sided with Cotto hitting Kamegai with shots repeatedly, and making him miss with the occasional shots he would throw. In the 12th, Cotto nailed Kamegai with an elbow to the head. There was no warning from the referee. It was Cotto who appeared to apologize to Kamegai. I’m not sure what the referee was doing. I guess he must have missed it just like he missed all the shoving that Cotto was doing.

Cotto got away with many different fouling techniques in the fight. One of the favorites that Cotto did all night was pushing off on Kamegai to keep on the outside. This is supposed to illegal. Kamegai turned to the referee Lou Moret several times during the fight to complain to him about the shoving from Cotto. Moret just stared at Kamegai blankly without doing anything. It was strange. Normally, a referee jumps in at a certain point and warns a fighter to stop shoving or else they’ll take off points. Not tonight. Moret just and watched while Cotto pushed Kamegai when he would come forward. It was bending the rules by Cotto. The other thing that Cotto was doing during the fight was sticking the crown of his head into the face of Kamegai, and then walking him forward. That’s something the referee should have done something to address that.

With the victory, Cotto is now the WBO 154lb champion. He likely won’t ever defend it, because he only has one fight left in his career in December. He’ll likely fight the winner of the Gennady Golovkin vs. Saul Canelo Alvarez fight. David Lemieux is also an option. Cotto would be no match for any of those three fighters in view. Golovkin would destroy Cotto with the way he looked tonight.

Cotto looked like he lost a lot of his boxing skills from his last fight. He doesn’t have enough left to beat Canelo, Golovkin or Lemieux. I think Lemieux would be bad for Cotto, because he hits so hard. If Cotto gets away with shoving Lemieux each time he comes forward looking to land, he might be able to prolong the inevitable, but eventually I see Cotto getting knocked out.

HBO needs to step it up and make sure they don’t let fights like this happen in the future. This was bad news for boxing to have an awful like this in the main event HBO can do better than that. They should have rejected the idea of Cotto fighting Kamegai and insisted instead that he fight someone that has a chance of beating him like David Lemieux or Erickson Lubin. I don’t know if Cotto would have ever agreed to fight any of those guys though.

With the potential of a big money rematch against Canelo in December, I think it’s likely that Cotto would have gone in another direction if had had to fight Lubin or Lemieux for the WBO junior middleweight title instead Kamegai. This was such a terrible fight. Words can’t describe. It reminded me of some of Cotto’s mismatches in the past against Yuri Foreman and Sergio Martinez. Both of those guys had bad knees going into their fights with Cotto. Kamegai didn’t have an injury holding him back. He just lacked talent. He looked like a fighter that did not belong ranked in the top 15. You must wonder what the WBO is thinking now after one of their highly rated contenders was beaten so soundly. If the WBO had done their job right by ranking Lubin near the top, we wouldn’t have seen this mismatch tonight.