By Chris Williams: According to Steve Kim on his twitter, former two division world champion Zab Judah (42-7, 29 KO’s) is out of the running to face WBO interim light welterweight champion Juan Manuel Marquez (54-6-1, 39 KO’s) on July 14th at the Cowboys Stadium due to Judah wanting more money than Top Rank was willing to pay him to take the fight.

This is disappointing news but also not quite surprising as well. Judah, 34, isn’t a Top Rank fighter, so it’s understandable why they may not be willing to give him what he’s asking for. However, the options to face Marquez on July 14th are less appealing.

With Judah now out of the picture, Top Rank promoter Bob Arum will likely go ahead with the original plan of putting either of his unbeaten Top Rank fighters light welterweight Mercito Gesta (25-0-1, 13 KO’s) or former WBA World lightweight champion Brandon Rios (30-0-1, 22 KO’s) in with Marquez.

Gesta, 5’7″, would work in terms of giving Marquez a southpaw to get ready to fight a rematch with Manny Pacquiao later on in the year. However, Gesta has looked completely awful in some of his recent fights and he’s clearly not ready and not going to be ready to ever face a guy like Marquez until he ages out.

Gesta won’t be interesting fight because he’s someone that struggles even against the lesser fighters he’s taking on now from the 2nd tier. It would be a waste of a fight for Arum and Marquez, because Marquez will destroy Gesta and not get anything out of it. At the same time, Arum will have Gesta exposed and it’ll be that much harder to make money with him in the future if he’s fed to Marquez. This isn’t a situation where a fighter is put in with a popular fighter and he ends up becoming well known. This is a situation where an obscure lesser fighter gets put in with a star and he gets blown out and looks awful

Rios is also a bad choice because he’s tainted due to his controversial 12 round decision over Richard Abril last month. Putting Rios in with Marquez is like a putting a dark cloud over the fight where you got a guy that’s being rewarded after being give a gift decision. Arum needs to put Rios back in with Abril so he can remove the taint from Rios. That, of course, isn’t going to happen because Abril appears to have Rios’ number and would likely dominate him in the rematch more than he did the first time. But Marquez deserves better than to fight a guy that a lot of boxing fans aren’t happy with right now.

Rios needs work his way back up the way all fighters do after they beaten and exposed by taking on decent B or C level opposition and slowly getting back in there. You don’t reward Rios by giving him a fight against Marquez off of the Abril fight. If I’m Marquez, I’d veto the Rios fight because I think I wouldn’t be the first guy that fights Rios off of a controversial fight like the the Abril-Rios fight.