By Dan Ambrose: A fight between WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley and Lamont Peterson is currently being negotiated to take place on December 15th on HBO. If that fight can’t be worked out, Peterson, 28, will go ahead and defend his IBF light welterweight title against his mandatory challenger Zab Judah.

On Tuesday, Peterson’s manager/trainer Barry Hunter won a purse bid to promote the Judah-Peterson fight with a winning bid of only $50,000. Obviously the interest wasn’t there because it’s assumed that Peterson will be facing Bradley next, not Judah. However, Judah is thought to be the backup plan for Peterson in case the Bradley fight can’t be worked out, according to Steve Kim.

HBO obviously would be more than happy to air a fight between Bradley and Peterson, because the alternative is a fight between Bradley and light welterweight contender Ruslan Provodnikov. That’s not a particularly interesting fight, although HBO would probably snatch that up as well. They’re probably not about to burn their bridges with Top Rank by failing to televise Bradley’s next fight no matter who he ends up facing.

What makes the Bradley-Peterson fight a fail is the fact that Peterson doesn’t have a huge fan base outside of the Washington, DC area where he lives, and the fact that he was already easily beaten by Bradley three years ago in 2009, losing by a lopsided 12 round unanimous decision. There’s no way you can watch that fight and get excited about seeing Bradley and Peterson mix it up again. That fight was even more one-sided than Paquiao’s dominating performance against Miguel Cotto in 2009. Peterson stood no chance against Bradley and was beaten up on the inside all night long.

The only thing that Bradley couldn’t do in that was score a knockout. It’s too bad Top Rank couldn’t get Andre Berto to fight Bradley, because I’d much prefer to see Berto face Bradley then to see the slender, non-punching Peterson dragged up from the light welterweight division to fight Bradley again. One thing we don’t know for this fight is whether Peterson will be on testosterone therapy while training and fighting. He was recently popped for testing positive for synthetic testosterone while training for a rematch against Amir Khan.

It was then learned that Peterson was taking testosterone under a medical doctor’s care to treat his own abnormally low natural testosterone. If Peterson’s testosterone is still low then he’ll be at a huge disadvantage if he isn’t allowed to use the synthetic testosterone. That could make a second fight between Bradley and Peterson an even more of a mismatch. If Peterson can’t use testosterone then it would be good to see how he does against some other opponents than putting him in with a world champion like Bradley, who already beat him badly once.