By Jason Kim: When you’ve got a huge middleweight like WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (44-0-1, 31 KO’s) it’s a big advantage for him to come into his fights a lot heavier than his opponents.
However, this same weight advantage can also turn out to be a real negative for him if he’s forced to fight at a higher pace than he wants and if his lighter more agile opponent can take him into the deeper rounds to wear him down. That opponent is Marco Antonio Rubio, who will likely weigh as much as much as 25 pounds lighter than Chavez Jr. on Saturday night.
Rubio will definitely have problems with Chavez Jr’s weight in the first half of the fight, but if he’s able to push Chavez at a faster pace than he’s been fighting at and then get him into the second half of the fight, Rubio will have a real chance to score a knockout.
It’s no secret that Chavez Jr. has had conditioning problems in the past and has faded in the second half of his fights in some cases. In his bouts that have gone past the 8th round, Chavez Jr. has rarely looked good. The John Duddy fight was a rare exception, but that was mostly because Duddy didn’t have the power and didn’t press the attack the way he needed to in order to wear Chavez Jr. down.
Sebastian Zbik was able to land a lot of punishing shot against Chavez, but he didn’t have the power and Chavez Jr. came into that weight weighing 185lbs on fight night. Fighting a guy that huge is difficult because we’re talking about a cruiserweight fighting a middleweight. That’s basically what it is. But draining all that weight to get down to 160 has got to be unhealthy and will have a weakening effect on Chavez Jr. if Rubio can get him into the second half of the fight and really push the pace.
Chavez Jr. doesn’t move very well and it’s kind of obvious that roadwork isn’t his thing. He likes to go right after his smaller opponents and run them over in the first six rounds. If his opponents make it past the 6th, you generally see Chavez Jr. gasping for breath in between rounds and looking like he’s going terminal. That tells that if Rubio can push it at a high pace for extended period of time, he has a good chance of wearing Chavez Jr. down and getting a stoppage.
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