Photo credit: Alma Montiel – By Dan Ambrose: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum is incredibly happy with the amount of tickets sold for Saturday’s bout between WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (44-0-1, 31 KO’s) and challenger Marco Antonio Rubio (53-5-1, 46 KO’s) at the Alamodome, in San Antonio, Texas.

Chavez-Rubio will be the feature bout on the HBO televised bout, and Nonito Donaire vs. Wilfredo Vazquez Jr. will be the co-feature in a fight for the vacant WBO super bantamweight title. Arum says that 10,000 tickets have sold for the fight, according to Dan Rafael, and he expects 13,000 to be sold by Saturday night. That’s a respectable number for a card like this as none of the fighters involved are at the super star level as of yet.

Chavez Jr. , the son of boxing legend Julio Cesar Chavez, will be making his second defense of his World Boxing Council belt against the veteran Rubio, and Chavez sees a win in this fight to be proof that he’s arrived as a fighter and is one of the best in the division.

Chavez Jr. is already the best but the division is very weak now that Kelly Pavlik and Arthur Abraham have moved up in weight, so it’s not quite as big of an accomplishment as would have been four years ago when the division was a lot healthier.

Jermain Taylor is making a comeback so hopefully he can get a fight against Chavez Jr. and/or Rubio in the future because there just isn’t enough talent in the middleweight division to have a champion seem like an actual champion rather than a paper champ, which is how Chavez Jr. is perceived.

Chavez Jr. can’t keep getting steered around the best fighter in the division in Sergio Martinez. Arum is keeping Chavez Jr. on top by maneuvering around Martinez, but it’s preventing Chavez Jr. from gaining the respect from boxing fans that actually have some knowledge about the sport.

This will be a huge win for Chavez Jr. if he can pull it off tomorrow night. Rubio probably isn’t in the same class as Sergio Martinez, Gennady Golovkin, Felix Sturm, Matthew Macklin, Martin Murray, Andy Lee, Darren Barker, Daniel Geale, Dmitry Pirog, Sebastian Zbik, Osumanu Adama, or Gzegorz Proksa, but he’s definitely a top 13 contender. A win over him will at least put Chavez Jr. in the top 13 in the division. A loss will prove what many boxing fans already think of Chavez Jr., that he’s a paper champion that is parading around Sergio Martinez’s WBC belt as a pretend champion and protected by the WBC.