How much longer can Chavez Jr. be shielded from Sergio Martinez?

By Boxing News - 01/04/2012 - Comments

Image: How much longer can Chavez Jr. be shielded from Sergio Martinez?By Allen Fox: Bob Arum has already made it clear that he’s not interested in matching his fighters against Sergio Martinez. The problem is Arum really doesn’t have much choice when it comes to his fighter WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr.

He holds a title and the World Boxing Council has already give Martinez the promise that he would get a fight with Chavez Jr. next, which the WBC has no apparently broken the promise. However, it’s still very clear that Chavez Jr. is going to have to defend his title against Martinez very soon – if Chavez Jr. doesn’t get beat by his next opponent Margo Antonio Rubio on February 4th – because it’s going to make the World Boxing Council and Top Rank look like bad if Chavez Jr. is able to be steered around Martinez without any end.

If Arum wanted to have a fighter that he could match against anyone, then he should have had Chavez Jr. capture the WBC belt against the paper champion Sebastian Zbik last year. As a champion you have to face the best guys sooner or later. You can’t just cherry pick forever, and that’s why the milking of the WBC title by Chavez Jr. has got to end at some point. Right now it makes the WBC look really bad that they’ve decided not to honor what they said to Martinez about getting the next fight against Chavez Jr.

But it’s going to look that much worse if they choose to let Chavez Jr. bypass Martinez again after this. At 25, how much longer is Chavez Jr. going to be carefully managed? He’s got to fight the top guy at some point don’t you think? It would be a tragedy if Chavez Jr. was to go from his fight with Rubio and then defend his WBC title against #2 ranked WBC challenger Zbik.

He already beat that guy but he’s the next highest WBC contender after Rubio. That would be pathetic. He could literally go round and round, ignoring Martinez each time if the WBC isn’t going to force the fight. The top 15 the WBC has ranked is pretty weak. There’s only a handful of fighters that I think could give Chavez Jr. problems, such as Andy Lee, Matthew Macklin, Martin Murray, Darren Barker, Grzegorz Proksa and Peter Quillin. But don’t hold your breath waiting for Chavez Jr. to fight any of them anytime soon because it’s not going to happen.



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