Chavez Jr. likely to face Antonio Margarito next

By Boxing News - 02/07/2012 - Comments

Image: Chavez Jr. likely to face Antonio Margarito nextBy Chris Williams: Whether the WBC blesses the fight or not, WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (45-0-1, 31 KOs) will likely be facing junior middleweight Antonio Margarito (38-8, 27 KO’s) rather than WBC Diamond middleweight champion Sergio Martinez or the other name that’s been mentioned recently Andy Lee.

Neither of those guys will likely get the fight, as Top Rank promoter Bob Arum will almost surely look to maximize profits while at the same time helping his fighter Margarito by having him fight Chavez Jr. next. One good look at Chavez’s recent win over Marco Antonio Rubio last Saturday night and you can see that Chavez Jr. needs to be kept far, far away from Sergio Martinez for the rest of his career.

For that matter, Chavez Jr. needs to be kept an equal distance from Lee, Gennady Golovkin, and Dmitriy Pirog. Those guys look so much better than Chavez Jr. right now, and it doesn’t matter if he comes into the ring weighing as much as heavyweight Wladimir Klitschko, Chavez Jr. would still lose to them because he’s got little power, little speed and no outcome game.

Chavez Jr. is still trying to fight like his famous father Julio Cesar Chavez and doing a poor job of it. He’s winning on a combination of hulking size and incredibly careful matchmaking by Arum. Remove one of those elements and Chavez Jr. will taste defeat big time.

So it looks like it’s going to be Margarito. It’s still speculation at this point you can be sure that Margarito WILL be the one that gets hand-picked by Arum. He has to. This has been Arum’s pattern. He’ll put one of his fighters in a rare fight against a non-Top Rank fighter that’s completely over-hyped, in this case the slow-moving, slow-punching, non-punching Rubio.

And now that Rubio is out of the picture, it’s back to the Top Rank stable guys. Arum has to make this fight because he has to find a fight for Margarito, and frankly there isn’t any big fights out there for Margarito right now other than Chavez Jr. or a third fight with Miguel Cotto. The Cotto-Margarito II fight was a mismatch, so there won’t be a third fight for a while. There definitely will be a third fight between them because Arum only has a small amount of chess pieces in his Top Rank stable, so you’ll see a lot od do overs like that.

It’s like someone with a limited selection of Mp3s. You’re going to hear the same music sooner or later because the person doesn’t have a big selection to choose from. I don’t want to see Margarito vs. Chavez Jr., but that’ what we’re going to be seeing. Margarito hasn’t won a REAL fight since 2008 when he defeated Miguel Cotto by n 11th round TKO. Since then, his only win was against some obscure fighter named Roberto Garcia, who Margarito beat by a 10 round decision in May 2010 and looked horrible the entire fight.

Margarito has lost his last two fights to Manny Pacquiao and Cotto, and three out of his last four fights. Will the WBC say yes to Chavez Jr. fighting Margarito? Are you kidding? This is an all Mexican fight. Of course they will and they won’t hesitate to sanction it. It’s going to be a one-sided stinker with Chavez Jr. coming to the ring probably weighing 180+ against a 160 pound Margarito with his bad right eye.



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