By William Mackay: Ross Greenburg, the president of HBO Sports, is interested in a potential match-up between 36-year-old lightweight Juan Manuel Marquez and WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan, according to Dan Rafael of ESPN.com. Greenburg seems to be assuming that Marquez will get by former lightweight champion Juan Diaz later on this month in their blockbuster pay-per-view event on July 31st. Greenburg says “We are going to try to make them happen. I think Khan-Marquez is certainly in the works. We hope it happens. Diaz can disrupt it in less than a month, but if Khan-Marquez happens and if Bradley-Alexander happens, we have a hot division. These fights have to take place. We ultimately have to get to a point where somebody is standing on the mountaintop.”

There are a couple of things that could disrupt Greenburg’s vision of a Marquez-Khan match-up. First off, Marquez may not win the fight against Diaz. Marquez looked pretty horrible in his last fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. last September. Marquez fought Mayweather at 143, and looked bloated, slow and old. In moving back down in weight to the lightweight division, you have to wonder whether the weight loss will effect Marquez and whether he has enough left in the tank to beat Diaz again.

He stopped him last year in a 9th round TKO, but the fight was fiercely contested early on, and Marquez was even dropped in the fight. It’s been a year now since Marquez and Diaz last fought, but he could have aged and deteriorated enough for Diaz to beat him now. Besides that, Marquez may decide to stay at lightweight and continue to defend his titles. There’s an appealing potential fight between him and WBO lightweight interim champion Michael Katsidis that Marquez may take instead.

That’s a good money fight. Marquez isn’t a big lightweight, having only moved up in weight last year from the super featherweight division. If Marquez moves up in weight to the light welterweight division, he might be asking a lot of his body. He hasn’t looked dominating at lightweight compared to how he looked as a super featherweight. If he does move up in weight, he might not be nearly the same fighter he was back when he was fighting as a featherweight and super featherweight.

A fight between Khan and Marquez would appear to benefit the taller Khan, who is looking more like a welterweight nowadays than a light welterweight. Marquez would be fighting someone much bigger than him and I suspect that would be enough for him to lose the fight. Greenburg might be better off looking to have Khan fight an actual light welterweight like Devon Alexander, Timothy Bradley or Victor Ortiz instead of having him fight lightweight like Marquez who is much smaller and 13 years older. Khan is 23, while Marquez is about to turn 37. Not exactly a sporting fight if you ask me.