By Dan Ambrose: Former WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. is reportedly in discussions with the high powered adviser Al Haymon, according to Dan Rafael. Chavez Jr. is reported to have been offered $47 million to sign with Haymon, according to es-us.deportes.yaoo.com. Chavez Jr. still has 9 months left on his existing contract with Top Rank, however, and that’s a lot of time left to set up the fight that could send Chavez Jr. to Haymon in stitches against Gennady Golovkin.
If Chavez Jr. gets destroyed by Golovkin, as many people expect him to, then it hardly matters if he bolts from Top Rank. Haymon would have a fighter who was beaten to a pulp by Golovkin, and who will soon be unable to make the 168lb division. If the $47 million offer is true, then Haymon could be stuck with a fighter who would have to be carefully matched if he was to value out of him.
Chavez Jr. would be out of his element in facing top light heavyweights like Adonis Stevenson and Bernard Hopkins. In signing up with Haymon, Chavez Jr. would likely have his fights televised on Showtime rather than HBO. This means he wouldn’t have to worry about fighting WBO champion Sergey Kovalev, who would likely dismantle Chavez Jr. even worse than Golovkin will.
Dan Rafael said this on his chat today about Chavez Jr:
“If Chavez winds up with Haymon, who he is talking to, there isn’t going to be a GGG fight. However, from what I understand, Chavez still has about 9 months left on his Top Rank contract, which means one more fight. When Arum returns from overseas next week, he and Chavez are supposed to meet. I still think that at the end of the day he and Chavez work things out and he winds up doing the GGG fight.”
Chavez Jr. is going to have to fight somebody in the remaining fight that he has on his Top Rank contract, and it might as well be Golovkin. Chavez Jr. needs to take that fight while he can still make 168, because in a very short time, Chavez Jr. will be lucky if he can even make 175. The guy is huge, and it’s got to be a major ordeal to dehydrate down from the 190s to get to 168. We’re talking about a cruiserweight draining down to fight at super middleweight. You can do that for a while, but this isn’t something that Chavez Jr. will be able to do much longer.
Top Rank is going to need to come up with a big offer to give Chavez Jr. if they want to keep him under contract. The question is should they bother? Once Chavez Jr. is fighting at 175 and above, he’ll be just another fighter and his chances of fighting success will be incredibly low. Chavez Jr’s weight advantage over his lighter opponents has been one of the things that has helped his career, but once he’s fighting at 175 and cruiserweight, he won’t have any advantage over any of his opponents.
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