By Dan Ambrose: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum has made his mind up that his young mini-cash cow fighter WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (45-0-1, 31 KO’s) won’t be fighting former WBC middleweight champ Sergio Martinez (48-2-2, 27 KO’s) in Chavez’s next title defense.
Arum doesn’t feel that Chavez Jr. is ready for the challenge and thinks he needs at least two to three more fights before he will be ready. Of course, by then Martinez will 38-years-old and possibly old enough for the limited Chavez Jr. to beat him.
Arum told USAtoday.com writer Bob Velin this week “He’s [Chavez Jr.] not going to fight him [Martinez] next. You have to understand, Chavez is getting better and better, but there’s still room for improvement, there’s still stuff that Freddie [Roach] wants to see. I would think Chavez would have two more fights and then Martinez. It’s stupid to take a kid like Chavez and throw him before my matchmakers and Freddie agrees he’s ready.”
Chavez Jr. will turn 26 on February 16th, and has already fought 46 times as a pro. Granted, Chavez Jr. didn’t have the benefit of an amateur career, but he’s fought a whole mess of fights and he is WBC middleweight champion, not a challenger. Arum is speaking of Chavez Jr. like he’s a prospect/contender and someone to be protected. You can’t have that when a fighter is holding down a world title. The time to protect a fighter is BEFORE he captures a title, not after.
What Arum is talking about here is that he’s protecting Chavez Jr. by keeping him away from Martinez so that he can pick up more experience before he makes that fight. Well, that’s bad for boxing to have a champion that needs to be protected from a challenger, especially mandatory challenger like Martinez.
Arum is going to have to make a decision about whether he’ll have Chavez Jr. vacate his WBC title or pull some other trick to get him out of the Martinez fight, because the World Boxing Council had made Martinez the mandatory challenger for Chavez Jr. now and the only way to get out of that is if Arum can get the WBC to let Chavez Jr. fight someone else instead of Martinez. That recently happened when Chavez Jr. was ordered by the WBC to fight Martinez, but then they asked the WBC for permission to fight Marco Antonio Rubio instead and they were allowed to do this. There was no step aside fee paid to Martinez in getting bypassed, and according to him, he wasn’t asked ahead of time by the WBC or Arum if they were agreeable to waiting for Chavez Jr. to take the Rubio fight.
Martinez’s promoter Lou Dibella is insisting that his fighter get a shot at Chavez Jr’s title, and is saying that Chavez Jr. has to “fight him or he has to vacate his title.” The WBC holds the key to all of this. They have now made Martinez the mandatory for a second time. If they stand firm behind that then Arum will have three alternatives: 1. Agree to the Martinez rematch 2. Have Chavez Jr. vacate his title 3. Pay Martinez a nice step aside fee.
I have a feeling that Arum won’t do any of these three, and will just go ahead and schedule Chavez Jr’s next fight and then see if the WBC does anything to stop it. They probably won’t unfortunately.
I really believe Chavez Jr. will be an improved fighter in two or three fights.
If anything, I can see Chavez Jr. looking worse than he is now because he’s getting bigger and is more sluggish with all the weight he’s putting on and taking off. The improvements that Chavez Jr. is making with his trainer Freddie Roach are minimal. Chavez Jr. looked awful against Rubio on February 4th, showing little power, and fighting like an uncoordinated over-sized fighter. He won the fight, but mostly due to his 20 pound weight advantage and because Rubio was never a very special fighter to begin with.
I think Roach is a decent trainer but he’s not going to be able to make any notable changes in Chavez Jr’s ability in two or three fights. What we see now is what we’ve been seeing from Chavez Jr. since he first started fighting for Roach. Chavez Jr. has been with Roach for five fights now – John Duddy, Billy Lyell, Sebastian Zbik, Peter Manfredo Jr., and Rubio. And I think Chavez Jr. looked at his best in the Duddy fight when he had only been with Roach for a few weeks, but that wasn’t because of Roach. That was just Chavez Jr. in shape and fighting a fringe contender made to order for him and pretty much anyone in the division.
I think in two or three fights by Chavez Jr., Arum still won’t match Chavez Jr. against Martinez and will come up with the same excuse about his matchmaker and Roach still saying Chavez Jr. isn’t ready to fight Martinez. Where we’re probably going with all this is for Chavez Jr. to wait Martinez out until he’s totally shot before Chavez Jr. is allowed to fight him. We saw that with Shane Mosley not getting a fight against Arum’s fighter Manny Pacquiao until Mosley was a completely shot 40-year-old.
Martinez is on his way to 40, but he’s still fighting way too good for Chavez Jr. and I can’t see that changing any by next year.
Chavez Jr. is just so awful that even a 40-year-old Martinez would be hitting too hard and would have too much quickness for him. Chavez Jr. is just some slow guy that beats guys on size advantage alone and the guys he’s been facing are beatable guys.
I can understand Arum wanting to protect his fighter Chavez Jr., but when he’s holding down a world title, you can’t be protecting him without hurting the sport. If Arum doesn’t want Chavez Jr. to fight his mandatory challenger Martinez, then Arum needs to have Chavez Jr. vacate the title rather than continuing to bypass him each time. It puts the WBC in a bad position because they’re trying to uphold their rules and if Arum is circumventing what the WBC is ruling, it makes the WBC look kind of like a useless organization.
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