Miguel Cotto Fights His Uncle/Trainer, Wins

Yesterday featured what many have thought for some time now to be an inevitable end to the professional relationship between Puerto Rican fighter Miguel Cotto and his uncle/trainer, Evangelista Cotto.

As befits the hardest game, the relationship did not go gently into that good night.

At a training session Wednesday afternoon at the Bairoa Gym in Caguas, Puerto Rico, Cotto and his uncle got involved in a verbal argument about strategy for Cotto’s June 13th fight with Joshua Clottey at Madison Square Garden. This argument got heated and led to Cotto declaring that his uncle was fired, at which point, the whole thing turned physical and the fists did fly. If you’ve seen Miguel Cotto fight before, then you know that Evangelista Cotto must be one seriously mean hombre to feel confident about throwing down in a bare-knuckles brawl with his welterweight bruiser of a nephew.

But throw down he did. Evidently, it was an ugly situation, one that saw Cotto’s father, Miguel Cotto Sr., step into the fray to try and break it up. Cooler heads prevailed inside the gym as the fracas died down, but it flared up again outside the gym in what was an even more vicious altercation, one that concluded with Evangelista throwing a cement block at the fighter while he was driving, breaking the passenger side window of his new Jaguar.

Police were summoned, but nobody was arrested. Evidently, Evangelista was able to weasel out of a ride in the paddy wagon by saying that the cement block thing was a training technique. “If he can duck a cement block that I throw at his head while driving, then he can duck anything Josh Clottey throws at him,” the trainer said.

I kid because I love. In all seriousness, Evangelista Cotto was whisked off to the hospital after the incident, which is about what one would expect to happen when a middle-aged man takes it upon himself to fight one of the best welterweights in the world in the prime of his life.

In his statement today, Miguel said that his uncle indeed will no longer be a member of his team, but that this will have no effect on his preparation for Clottey. Here is a translation from Boxing Scene:

“This is a very personal matter and a family matter and therefore I would like to have some space and respect for my privacy to deal with the situation,” Cotto said. “From this day forward Evangelista Cotto will not be a part of my corner, but everyone knows that I will continue to work tirelessly for my next fight in June, when I will defend with success and a lot of pride my title for all of the Puerto Ricans.”

So, how bad is this is for Cotto’s training camp as he moves towards a fight that promises to be just as demanding as his 11-round Waterloo last summer with Antonio Margarito? Well, it’s generally never a positive thing to have such a disruption in one’s focus, but it’s not as if there hasn’t been tension in Cotto’s camp before. The rumor last year was that fighter and trainer/uncle were barely speaking to each other prior to the Margarito fight. And though Cotto did lose that bout, he also fought a tremendous fight in which he seemed to draw on every last drop of his mettle and reserve. If that’s how he fights when he’s feuding with his uncle, then maybe feuding with his uncle should be a regular ritual in training for him.

But as the Hatfields and the McCoys will tell you, there’s a difference between feuding and, well, actively trying to kill each other. The simmering pot has boiled over, the cat’s out of the bag, etc. Many have written in the past that Cotto needed a new trainer if he wanted to completely fulfill his potential, that his uncle was an impediment to his progress. Based on what I’ve seen of Cotto’s development in the ring, going from a one-dimensional and often defenseless brawler in his youth to a varied, mobile boxer who has the ability to trade speed and fury with the likes of Shane Mosley, I have to wonder about that. Nevertheless, if this breakdown between fighter and uncle were as inevitable as everyone was reporting, and if Cotto is left with no choice but to find himself another chief second, then it’s good that it happened now and not two weeks before the fight.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.