Butler vs. Cook in domestic battle for North American junior middleweight belts
MONTREAL — Steven Butler says he doesn’t speak a lot of English, but he mustered enough to face Brandon Cook and say “I’m going to knock you out.”
That injected a needed dose of animosity into an otherwise amicable news conference Thursday to promote their light middleweight showdown.
Butler versus Cook sounds more like a dispute between domestics than the old-time Quebec-Ontario domestic dispute that is set for Saturday night at the Bell Centre. Only a 6,000-seat section of one end of the 21,000-seat arena will be used but promoter Camille Estephan expects to be at least close to a sellout, including 500 or more Cook fans from his hometown of Toronto.
Cook (17-0) sees himself as a blue-collar battler who has had to work for every victory and views Butler (18-0-1), of Montreal, as a coddled upstart who has built his record fighting “tomato cans.”