Arum: The next Chavez Jr-Martinez fight will be even bigger than the first

By Boxing News - 09/17/2012 - Comments

Image: Arum: The next Chavez Jr-Martinez fight will be even bigger than the firstBy Dan Ambrose: With the paint still not even dry from their fight last Saturday night, WBC middleweight champion Sergio Martinez and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. are already being mentally penciled in for a rematch at the Cowboys Stadium in Texas for early 2013, and Chavez Jr’s promoter Bob Arum sees it as a fight that will bring in huge money at the gate and on pay per view.

Arum said to examiner.com “They want to do an immediate rematch. This fight did unbelievable business. The next fight will be even bigger business.”

Is that possible? Surely there’s got be more exciting fights than this for boxing fans to dump their hard-earned money on. For $49.99, boxing fans saw a dull fight between Martinez and Chavez Jr. that had one interesting round and 11 boring rounds.

In addition to that, fans saw Guillermo Rigondeaux dominate Robert Marroquin through 12 rounds, Matthew Macklin destroy Joachim in 1 round, little known Willie Nelson win controversial 10 round decision over John Jackson, light heavyweight Mike Lee beat Paul Harness in a 4 round decision and Roman Martinez defeat Miguel Beltran Jr. There wasn’t much on the card to speak of.

A rematch between Martinez and Chavez Jr. will likely do good numbers, because boxing fans will have a short memory about how badly schooled Chavez Jr. was in the first 11 rounds against Martinez last Saturday night and will instead focus only on the 12th round in remembering how the fight transpired. That’s good for Arum, Martinez and Chavez Jr., because they’ll make out real well when the PPV totals are countered up for the Martinez-Chavez Jr. rematch, but it’ll likely be bad for fans who were hoping to see a competitive fight because a healthy Martinez will beat Chavez Jr. even worse than he did last time out.

Martinez stands go get a minimum payday of $2 million plus a lot more from the PPV upside for the fight. Chavez Jr. will of course end up making more than Martinez, and we could see Chavez Jr. with a minimum guarantee of $3 million. What will be interesting is to see how many boxing fans stream into the Cowboys Stadium to watch the fight. Manny Pacquiao was able to get huge crowds there for his fights against Joshua Clottey and Antonio Margarito. A rematch between Chavez Jr. and Martinez would potentially draw as many as 40,000 fans, if not more.



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