K.O.W. - Portrait of the Artist after a Clean Shot to the Liver

In that Shane Mosley already has figured in one of our K.O.W.'s (a real gem too - Mosley v. Gomez, 1997), and mysteriously, Miguel Cotto has not, our Knockout of the Week is a lay-up. I take you back two years to a crossroads in Cotto's rising career, a fight in September of '05 against the lightly regarded Colombian Ricardo Torres, the first undercard of the heavily hyped Wlad Klitschko/Sam Peter bout in A.C. Large was in attendance for this one, along for the ride with our soul brother number one, Aaron Cohen. I confess that I was expecting to see nothing more from the undercard than some routine ultra-violence from Cotto. What I got instead was ultra-violent viddies from both of the principals in a gutcheck smackdown that, had it not occurred in 2005, would have been a cinch for Fight of Any Other Year (there was the small matter in '05, you will recall, of Castillo/Corrales I).

It was all-out nuclear war from the opening bell. Seven knockdowns were registered in all, 5-2 in favor of Cotto, and yet that does not even tell the tale, because Cotto took a liver-shot in the first round that bent him at the waist and opened him to a blistering flurry of bombs. This in my memory was the most danger he faced in the fight, and he had two trips to the canvas still ahead of him.

I've attached the last two minutes of the seventh round, but if you're a devotee of the fistic arts and you've never seen this thing, you might as well take a half-hour and check it out in full on YouTube. As Harold Lederman says below, five of the first six rounds were 10-8's, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know. This is a central exhibit in the canon of Cotto - like all young dynamos, eventually he was going to face some journeyman hardhead who more than makes up for his lack of natural ability with an utter absence of fear in his heart for any man alive. Torres was such a man, and when Cotto approached him with the expectation that he would fold from the mere force of his will, Torres shocked the Puerto Rican wunderkind by matching that force and even raising its intensity. At that point, Cotto, visibly unprepared for such a contest, might have packed it in, a result that would have been devastating to his development as a superstar. Instead, he called on his inner resources and persevered through his greatest test to date.



(p.s. - I'll be previewing Cotto/Mosley in full this Friday, with a prognostification that will call the result right down the ROUND. Word is bond...)