By Norm Frauenheim-
LAS VEGAS – Measuring interest in a fight isn’t exactly a science. It’s more a haphazard adventure. Either a so-called buzz is there, or it isn’t. For a couple of days, media prospectors were sifting though all the events surrounding Miguel Cotto-Canelo Alvarez, searching for one.
For days, not much was there. Echoes instead of real noise created doubt about the pay-per-view hopes and suspicions about fans staying away from Mandalay Bay Saturday night because of skepticism left over from the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao mess in May.
But the empty echoes were suddenly gone Friday. Instead, there was a buzz that filled three ballrooms from crowds of fans who waited in line for three to four hours to watch the Cotto-Canelo weigh-in.
The buzz was off-the-scale amid sudden optimism about pay-per-view numbers for an HBO telecast (6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET) that Golden Boy promoter Oscar De La Hoya has said could approach 1.5 million.
That expectation might still be too high. But a buzzing crowd at the weigh-in indicated that a very good PPV audience is likely. Latino fans – Puerto Rican for Cotto (40-4, 33 KOs) and Mexican for Canelo (45-1-1, 32 KOs) – jammed one ballroom for the live weigh-in and two adjacent ballrooms to watch the telecast.
Both made the catch-weight, 155 pounds, for a 160-pound, middleweight title that the WBC stripped from Cotto on Monday after he refused to pay the $300,000 sanctioning fee. A sculpted Canelo was right at the agreed-upon weight. Cotto was at 153.5, which is a half-pound lighter than the junior-middleweight limit. This is a middleweight fight in name only. But it doesn’t matter.
The anticipation is real for a classic, cut straight out of the rich tradition of the Mexican-Puerto Rican history.
“They are here because they think they are about see a war,’’ De La Hoya said.
The war parallel is little tired and probably too much, especially these days with all that is going in France and Syria. But boxing without hyperbole is a fight without a buzz. Nobody would care.
At the weigh-in, the roar said — again and again — that a lot people care intensely about one fight that might take the business beyond Pacquiao-Mayweather.
The weigh-in included at least one disappointing moment. Unbeaten Randy Caballero was at 123.5, or 5.5 pounds too heavy for the 118-mandtaory in a scheduled defense of his IBF bantamweight title against the UK”s Lee Haskins. About an hour after the weigh-in, the Nevada State Athletic Commission said that the title fight had been cancelled.
Did it matter? No, not at all. If there were any complaints, you couldn’t hear them. You could hear only that buzz.
