By Jim Dower: WBA featherweight champion Chris John (42-0-1, 22 KOs) will be facing Rocky Juarez (28-4-1, 20 KOs) in a much needed rematch next month on June 27th. This time, the bout will take place on neutral territory at the Staples Center, in Los Angeles, California. Their previous fight in February 2009 ended up in a controversial 12 round draw which left few fans happy.

Although the bout ended up as draw, it looked as if John had won the fight by a considerably margin, as much as four rounds by a lot of boxing fans and writers. I personally had Juarez only winning one round in the fight, the 12th.

Before that, Juarez has fought passively for much of the fight, throwing fewer punches than he normally does in his fights. It looked as if Juarez was trying to avoid sustaining punishment and appeared to give most of the rounds away to John without putting up a fight.

For Juarez, it was a departure from his past performances against Juan Manuel Marquez and Marco Antonio Barrera in which Juarez slugged it out with both fighters for the full 12 rounds. However, Juarez took an awful lot of punishment in both of the fights and his face was badly swollen up by the end of the grueling fights.

Against John, though, Juarez stayed on the outside and jabbed much of the time, not throwing the bombs that he’s accustomed to in his fights. This passive style of fighting wasn’t suited for Juarez, because he doesn’t have the boxing skills that John has and found himself quickly falling behind in the fight.

While Juarez may have had little luck in beating Marquez and Barrera, at least in those fights Juarez looked good part of the time when he was letting his hands go. Juarez didn’t match up well against Marquez, but he did with Barrera and their two fights were very close, especially the first one which Barrera won by 12-round split decision.

The fight probably should have been ruled a draw because Juarez looked like he had done enough to deserve nothing less than that.

Sergio Martinez Becomes WBC Junior Middleweight Champion

With Vernon Forrest injured due to an injury to his rib, his light middleweight World Boxing Council title was stripped from him on Thursday because he hadn’t fought his mandatory challenger on time according to news from Dan Rafael of ESPN. The next move that the WBC made was they placed Sergio Martinez as the new champion of the WBC.

However, Forrest still has the opportunity to challenge Martinez for the WBC title when his injury gets better at some point in the future. By the time that Forrest’s injury heals, Martinez may or may not still be the champion because he has to face the winner of Kermit Cintron vs.

Alfredo Angulo to determine his mandatory challenger. In the meantime, Martinez will possibly be matched up against the little known number #13th ranked Christophe Canclaux or Charles Whittaker for an easy payday in bouts that would be awful for boxing fans to see in terms of it being a competitive fights.