Moments after Gennady Golovkin drilled Daniel Geale in the third round on Saturday night at New York's Madison Square Garden to retain his middleweight belt for the 11th time, GGG called for a unification fight with Miguel Cotto.
"I am very happy and now I only want unification fights. I want Cotto," Golovkin said. "I want to fight Miguel Cotto and I want to fight him next. I want to prove to the world that without a doubt that I am the best middleweight in the world. That is very important to me."
On June 7, also at MSG, Cotto made boxing history, becoming the first Puerto Rican fighter to win a world title in four weight classes when he dominated and stopped Sergio Martinez in the 10th round to win the legitimate 160-pound championship, along with an alphabet belt.
Golovkin and Cotto are both slated to fight one more time this year but nobody should go holding their breath that it will be against each other, no matter how much Golovkin wants it.
"Certainly, it's up to Miguel who he wants to fight but I think the Canelo [Alvarez] fight is a much more attractive fight," Top Rank's Bob Arum, Cotto's promoter, told ESPN.com on Tuesday. "Even though I love Golovkin and [K2 Promotions managing director] Tom Loeffler -- and nobody can say that Golovkin isn't a great fighter -- it's risk-reward in boxing. We don't know about Golovkin's ability on pay-per-view."
More likely, Golovkin will fight in October or November. Cotto is penciled in to fight again in December at the Garden, and likely not against anyone nearly as tough as Golovkin so as not to jeopardize the possibility of the Alvarez fight next spring.
Gaby Penagaricano, Cotto's adviser, said he wasn't surprised to hear Golovkin call out Cotto and said the fight would be one of the various possibilities they'd consider.
"I saw it on Saturday. Not surprised," Penagaricano told ESPN.com. "Everyone wants to call out the big names, right? We have not begun to discuss options for the next fight. Probably I will be sitting down with Miguel in the coming days to start planning. It's a fight to consider. I am sure we will be discussing it soon among other options."
Golovkin's name is sure to come up, but I just don't happen to think it will be a serious consideration because why would Cotto, who is winding down his great career, gamble by fighting a beast like Golovkin and risk the much bigger payday that would go with a possible fight with Alvarez?
One piece of good news from Arum is that he said Cotto's fight in December probably won't be on pay-per-view, no doubt in part because the numbers for the June fight with Martinez were so disappointing.
"I don't think it will be," Arum said. "I think we have to start doing more live premium television shows, so I don't think this will be on pay-per-view. It would be on HBO. We are meeting with HBO this week in Las Vegas and we'll be talking about it.
"We have to realize that pay-per-view, no matter if it's boxing, MMA or wrestling, the numbers are way down. People aren't buying the pay-per-view like they used to buy. You can see it in Cotto-Martinez, in [Floyd] Mayweather's [relatively] dismal numbers and in [Manny] Pacquiao's less-than-glorious numbers for the [rematch with Timothy] Bradley fight in April."