Miguel Cotto-James Kirkland cancellation nixes unworthy PPV card

Miguel Cotto-James Kirkland, which has been canceled due to a Kirkland injury, was never pay-per-view worthy to begin with. In fact, the matchup provided more compelling evidence that boxing’s Pay-Per-View model is a stale relic.

It seems that the maddening trend of protracted retirement tours has infected boxing, with four-division champion and Puerto Rican icon Miguel Cotto (40-5, 33 KOs) being the most recent culprit of crafting an athletic vanity project. And after seeing what happened with Bernard Hopkins’ disastrous sendoff, not to mention Manny Pacquiao’s ludicrous world tour, fight fans should actually be relieved that Cotto’s fight against James Kirkland (32-2, 28 KOs) fell apart.

That said, it is unfortunate that Kirkland sustained an injury. Kirkland, who was back in training with mentor Ann Wolfe, has always been a thrilling, albeit limited and vulnerable, fighter. Odds are he would have taken the fight to Miguel Cotto, but the following question has to be raised: To what end?

With Miguel Cotto set to retire at the end of 2017, it’s impossible to view his decisions this year as anything but cloying cash grabs. Indeed, his middleweight reign, fought exclusively at catchweights, will be primarily remembered for stonewalling Gennady Golovkin’s championship rise at 160. Although he did fight Canelo Alvarez in November of 2015, Cotto hasn’t otherwise been interested in serious opposition since 2012.

If Cotto were to retire now, given all he’s accomplished, that would be perfectly fine.

But instead, Miguel Cotto, who has not fought since that Canelo bout, felt it was fit to headline a pay-per-view card against a foe in James Kirkland who last stepped into the ring in May of that same year and was absolutely obliterated by Canelo in one of the more sickening knockouts of the past several years. Moreover, Kirkland hasn’t actually won a fight since he stopped Glen Tapia in December of 2013.

With Both Cotto and Kirkland on the downsides of their careers, the fight also carried no compelling future implications. Even if Kirkland had won and, say, halted Cotto, he’s already 32 and hasn’t scored a single victory over an elite, prime opponent. The best case scenario for Kirkland would have been him getting the human punching bag treatment in another Canelo-level contest.

The entire Cotto-Kirkland debacle was recently put under a microscope with the competing HBO and Showtime cards last weekend, where Leo Santa Cruz and Carl Frampton waged a scintillating rematch that saw Santa Cruz regain his featherweight title and Miguel Berchelt emerged as a force at 130 pounds with a stoppage of all-action warrior Francisco Vargas. Both cards were non-pay-per-view offerings, and both represented HBO and Showtime investing in fights — not fighters.

Miguel Cotto, much like Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao, has gotten to the point in his career where his need to curate every aspect of a fight and its promotion supersedes any remaining vestiges of logic. Cotto has always been somewhat petulant in negotiations, but he’s definitely fallen into the trap of plotting his career moves solely based on satisfying financial and egotistical needs.

And this is where the problem of pay-per-view is most evident. Compelling pay-per-view fights like Sergey Kovalev-Andre Ward underwhelms at the box office because neither fighter is a bankable commodity; rather, they are simply boxers of genuine substance — a fact the Pay-Per-View model undervalues. But “stars” like Miguel Cotto, Mayweather or Pacquiao ensure a certain financial bottom line will be met that ultimately fails to even partly account for the quality of opposition, the sport of boxing’s health or fan satisfaction.

Instead, pay-per-view cards are largely exercises in self-deception where fans are robbed of their money and the A-side fighter, who almost always wins, is continuously sold to the public based on the promise of what’s to come — a promise that is never fulfilled.

Next: Bernard Hopkins and the fallacy of fulfillment

Miguel Cotto and James Kirkland, likable as they are as fighters, represented one of the false promises that boxing had tried to sell its beleaguered fans in recent years. Here’s hoping Kirkland heals up and gets active, and that Cotto sticks to his word and retires at the end of 2017. Their paths are now no longer intertwined, and this has fans exhaling in relief.