Photo: Rafael Soto/Top Rank – By Dan Ambrose: Unbeaten junior middleweight contender Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (41-0-1, 30 KO’s) will be fighting for the first time with new trainer Freddie Roach on Saturday night against middleweight John Duddy (29-1, 18 KO’s) in the Latin Fury card at the Alamodome, in San Antonio, Texas. Roach has only trained the 24-year-old Chavez Jr. for all of six weeks, so he isn’t quite sure how he’ll look in the heat of battle against the 31-year-old Duddy.

However, Roach did like what he saw of Chavez Jr. in the training camp leading up to this fight. Roach would like to get more fight in after the Duddy bout and then have Chavez Jr. challenge for a title against either WBC middleweight champion Sergio Martinez or junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto. Chavez’s promoter Bob Arum might speed up the progress for Chavez’s career by putting him in with Cotto in his next fight.

This would be asking a lot of both Chavez and Roach, because he would have to mold Chavez into a better rounded fighter than he’s looked recently in some of outings against the B level fighters that have been fed to Chavez. The question then would be whether could take a diamond in the rough like Chavez and mold him quickly into being more like an Amir Khan, who is one of Roach’s recent minor success stories.

Khan looks a lot better since Roach got a hold of him, and has not only captured the WBA junior welterweight title with a win over previous champion Andriy Kotelnik last year, but has also successfully defended the title twice with wins over Dmitri Salita and Paulie Malignaggi. Of course, the criticism aimed at Khan and Roach is that Amir still hasn’t fought any of the truly dangerous fighters in the light welterweight division yet like Marcos Maidana, Devon Alexander and Timothy Bradley, and might not be for real.

But he’s looking like it right now at least. If Roach could do the exact same thing with Chavez Jr., who has looked nothing like a future champion in the first seven years of his career, it would be a huge thing for Roach and a big feather in his cap. Few people see Chavez Jr. as a future champion in any division. So if Roach can get Chavez by Duddy and then have him pull upset over Cotto or Martinez, it would a major accomplishment for Roach.

He would literally have fighters from all around the world flocking to his Wild Card Gym in Los Angeles to have him train them and turn them into future champions like Khan and maybe Chavez. It’s a long shot for Chavez to do more than beat Duddy, but it’s hard to discount what Roach is capable of doing. Just look at the massive changes that he’s made with the physique or Chavez Jr. He now almost looks sculpted after only six weeks of training. Can you imagine what Chavez Jr. would have looked like had he come to training camp on time and had the full eight weeks?