By Jason Kim: WBC middleweight champion Sergio Martinez (45-2-2, 24 KO’s) and his promoter Lou Dibella are finding it hard to find suitable opponents for a fight in the fall for HBO. Dan Rafael of ESPN says that he and Martinez gave a list of the fighters they would like to fight next to HBO, but apparently Martinez is getting shot down by each of the fighters.

The list includes the following fighters: Shane Mosley, Miguel Cotto, Paul Williams, Luis Collazo, Vanes Martirosyan, Alfonso Gomez, Sergio Mora, Alfredo Angulo, Antonio Margarito, Kermit Cintron, Felix Sturm, Cory Spinks and the winner of the June 26th fight between Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. and John Duddy. However, despite holding down the WBC middleweight title and being a popular fighter, there have been no bites for a fight against Martinez from any of these fighters.

This is kind of disappointing because Martinez and Dibella’s list is pretty huge, encompassing the best fighters in the light middleweight and middleweight divisions. You would think one of them would be interested in taking on Martinez and trying to win his title. But it could be that Martinez, who has a way of making his opponents look bad because of his speed, movement and crafty way of fighting, is someone that fighters would prefer not to have to fight unless they absolutely have to.

Martinez isn’t someone that will stand in front of these guys and try to roll over them the way that Pavlik did as a middleweight champion. Pavlik had little problems finding guys that wanted to fight him because many of them could see that he didn’t handle movement to well. Martinez defeated Pavlik by a 12 round unanimous decision on April 17th. Rather than use a rematch clause to fight Martinez again to try and get his titles back, Pavlik has opted to move up in weight to the super middleweight division.

The fact that Pavlik didn’t want to risk a second fight against Martinez shows how good a fighter that Martinez is. He’s just very difficult to fight because he moves so well and is hard to hit. He’s basically a nightmare for sluggers that depend on their opponents standing directly in front of them to do well.

Martinez has, like Paul Williams, to fight in two divisions – junior middleweight and middleweight – just to get fights, because of his problems in finding guys that are willing to fight him.

If none of the names on Martinez’s list step up to fight him anytime soon, he’s going to have to downgrade his options and start picking out some of the lower ranked fighters in the top 15 to fight. However, the problem there is that HBO might not be interested in showing Martinez’s next fight if he’s matched against a less than appealing opponent. And unfortunately there are a lot of obscure fighters ranked in the top 15 by the WBA. Martinez would likely have no problems landing a fight against them, but what’s the point if there’s no interest from the network and from boxing fans?