NEW YORK – Miguel Cotto forced Shane Mosley to fight his style of fight and retained his WBA welterweight championship with a unanimous decision in a fierce inside battle at Madison Square Garden.

Much of the fight was contested at close range, with the men taking turns battering each other with hooks to the head and body and powerful right hands.

Ultimately, it may have been the jab that Cotto spent months working on in the gym that proved to be the difference.

Judges Glenn Feldman and Peter Trematera each saw it 115-113 for Cotto, now 31-0. Judge Winn Kintz had it 116-113 for the Puerto Rican. Yahoo! Sports scored it 115-113 for Cotto.

Mosley, who said he hurt his right hand early in the bout, shook his head at the announcement of the decision.

"I think I won the fight," said Mosley, who fell to 44-5. "I dictated the action."

The battle was so close that they wound up landing the exact number of punches. Cotto connected on 248 of 675 shots, according to CompuBox, while Mosley landed

He's got a zero in the loss column, but Michael Bisping's fight record is hardly unblemished.

Even though he's headlining the UFC's first card in the metropolitan New York area in more than six years, Bisping still finds himself explaining his last fight more than he does his upcoming match with undefeated Rashad Evans on Nov. 17 at the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J.

Bisping won a split decision over bitter rival Matt Hamill on Sept. 5 in London in a bout that everyone, it seemed, but the Bisping family thought Hamill deserved to win. Even the vocal U.K. crowd seemed to turn on its hero, booing the outcome.

"Even a very good friend of mine, that night, he came up to me and said, 'You know mate, to be honest, I think you lost that fight,' " Bisping said.

The outpouring of anger among fans on the Internet was overwhelming, as they filled message boards with rants about the outcome.

And Bisping's behavior at the post-fight news conference, when he was surly and confrontational with

NEW YORK – Oscar De La Hoya is one of the fastest men to have inhabited the welterweight division in the last decade. He's also one of its hardest-hitting.

But the Golden Boy found Shane Mosley amazingly quick and surprisingly strong in each of their two fights.

"He has such fast hands and feet, he can get into position to throw a punch when you think there's no way he can do it," said De La Hoya, who dropped decisions to Mosley in 2000 and 2003 but is now business partners with him in Golden Boy Promotions. "And because he has such speed, his punches really sting. You can definitely feel them."

None of that can be particularly good news for Miguel Cotto, the WBA welterweight champion, who isn't particularly fast or quick.

But Cotto, who is 30-0 with 25 knockouts and ranked No. 6 in the Yahoo! Sports Top 10 poll, doesn't believe it will pose a problem for him when he defends his belt against Mosley in an HBO Pay-Per-View bout on Saturday at Madison Square Garden.

"A lot of guys told me

NEW YORK – Miguel Cotto, the WBA welterweight champion, is 30-0 with 25 knockouts but faces the most grave challenge to his perfect record on Saturday when he meets Shane Mosley at Madison Square Garden. Here is what each man must do to win:

He hasn't lost since the end of 2004 and he's reeled off victories over some of the top mixed martial artists in the world, but Jake Shields somehow remains one of the game's most anonymous stars.

And even when things seem to be going good for him, something happens to put a damper on it.

But Shields takes the view that sooner or later, it's going to dawn on the masses that he's one of the world's elite welterweights.

Shields, 28, hasn't lost since he dropped a decision to Akira Kikuchi on Dec. 14, 2004. Since, he's reeled off eight in a row, including wins over WEC champion Carlos Condit and top-ranked UFC middleweight Yushin Okami.

Shields, who is 19-4-1, thought he was going to be fighting Mike Pyle on Showtime on Saturday in Corpus Christi, Texas, for the Elite XC welterweight title.

He'll still be fighting Pyle and he'll still be on Showtime, but the title shot has vanished. Pyle was unhappy with the way he was being promoted by Elite XC and declined the title shot.

Shields wasn't

NEW YORK – David Letterman used to do a segment he called, "Brush with Greatness," in which he'd get audience members to recount meetings with celebrities.

Billy Dib would have been a perfect contestant, because he managed to ingratiate himself with a number of the most significant boxers of this era.

An aspiring super featherweight, Dib was on the verge of quitting boxing in 2004 after a motorcycle accident cost him a spot on Australia's Olympic team.

His mother, Ahlam, knew how badly he wanted to fight in the Olympics. And she knew how much talent he had hidden in the skinny body. And she was aware that he idolized Prince Naseem Hamed and could emulate each of his moves in the ring.

So she urged him to contact Hamed, who was living in the U.K., and ask for advice.

"You would think it's a crazy idea and it would never amount to anything," Dib said. "Of course, I felt that way. But when I was a baby, a wise man looked at me in the crib and said to my mother, 'You know, one day that boy

Joel Casamayor may not be the best 135-pound boxer in the world, but if you believe in fairness, honor and ethics, you must regard him as the lightweight champion.

The wily Cuban tough guy is 36 years old and will make his 2007 debut on Saturday at Madison Square Garden in New York when he takes on Jose Armando Santa Cruz in a 12-round lightweight bout on the undercard of the Miguel Cotto-Shane Mosley fight.

Had it been up to Casamayor, he'd have already had at least one, if not two, unification bouts this year.

"And isn't that what everyone in boxing is saying they want?" his trainer, Joe Goossen, asks plaintively.

Casamayor began the year holding the WBC's lightweight championship, a title he won on Oct. 7, 2006, when he decisioned the late Diego Corrales in Las Vegas.

But Casamayor suddenly was stripped by the WBC and doesn't appear in its February ratings. It lists him as unavailable to defend his belt.

His "unavailability" was simply the result of his management looking to unify

Miguel Cotto has never been one to use five words when two words would suffice. But even by Cotto's minimalist standards, this was unusual.

Cotto did little more than grunt his way through a series of interviews on Tuesday, four days before the biggest fight of his life, when he defends his WBA welterweight title against three-division former world champion Shane Mosley in an HBO pay-per-view bout at Madison Square Garden in New York. Cotto had the snarl, but the question that was left unanswered is whether it signifies he's ready to tear into Mosley or whether the enormity of the moment is finally catching up to him.

Mosley is the best opponent Cotto has faced, by far. And Cotto, who has professed confidence throughout the buildup, reacted Tuesday in many ways like a condemned man none too eager to make the long, final walk to the gallows. He said on a conference call last week that Zab Judah, whom he stopped in the 11th round of a sensational bout in June in New York, was more