By Dan Ambrose: 40-year-old Juan Manuel Marquez (55-7-1, 40 KO’s) could be in the ring in what would amount to be a tune-up fight on May 17th against Mike Alvarado (34-2, 23 KO’s), according to Fightnews. The Marquez-Alvarado fight would potentially be on the Mikey Garcia vs. Yuriorkis Gamboa fight card, if that fight even takes place. It’s still up in the air whether that fight will happen, though, because Mikey doesn’t seem all that excited about fighting the tough Cuban.
Marquez fighting Alvarado will give some fans the belief that Marquez is ducking WBO light welterweight champion Ruslan Provodnikov, who badly wants to fight Marquez because it would give him his first well known opponent of his career. Provodnikov recently fought Tim Bradley, but he’s not a star and casual boxing fans still don’t know much about him. Marquez doesn’t feel the interest in going after Provodnikov because he recently held the WBO title until vacating it last October rather than defending it.
Alvarado took a beating in his last fight in losing to Provodnikov last October. Alvarado looked weak and weight drained in that fight, and it brings the question of whether Alvarado should move up to 147 or 154 rather than having to work hard to get down to 140. His stamina looked poor against Provodnikov, as he was already tired looking by the 6th round. A lot of that could be from him having taken off so much weight to get down to 140.
Marquez is waiting on the winner of the Manny Pacquiao vs. Bradley rematch so that he can fight the winner of that fight next September. Top Rank promoter Bob Arum will likely immediately match the winner against Marquez, because he’s really the only guy in his Top Rank stable that he can match against Pacquiao that will bring in a good number of PPV buys. Arum was trying to get Marquez to fight Pacquiao on April 12th, but he turned the fight down because he wanted to go after the WBO 147 lb title that Bradley has. However, if Pacquiao is able to win the title then Marquez wants to fight him for it this year.
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