By Allan Fox: 36-year-old former WBO junior middleweight champion Sergiy Dzinziruk (37-1, 24 KO’s) has a crossroads fight coming up next month on September 1st against #5 WBO, #7 WBA, #11 WBC, Jonathan Gonzalez (15-0, 13 KO’s) in a scheduled 10 round bout at the Turning Stone Resort & Casino, in Verona, New York.

Dzinziruk is coming off of an 8th round stoppage loss to former WBC middleweight champion Sergio Martinez last year in March of 2011. The loss obviously was a crushing blow for Dzinziruk’s career, because he had been hoping to make a name for himself in the Unite States. The loss messed things up for Dzinziruk and also took away his unbeaten record. Dzinziruk didn’t exactly help himself after losing the fight by staying out of the ring for an entire year. By the time that Dzinziruk gets in the ring with Gonzalez next month, Dzinziruk will have been out of the ring for 18 months. That’s not smart when you’re getting up there in age like Dzinziruk. He really should have been back in the ring in July of last year, and then followed it fights in November, March 2013 and July 2013. The way that Dzinziruk did it, he missed out on four fights. It’s too bad because that’s a significant amount of time for any fighter.

Gonzalez, 23, is a tough customer for Dzinziruk to be coming back against and you have to wonder about the logic in Dzinziruk taking such a tough fight following 18 months of inactivity. It’s almost as if he’s gambling with his career. Gonzalez has recent wins over Rudy Cisneros, Richard Gutierrez and Billy Lyell. The knock on Gonzalez is that he doesn’t have much in the way of quality experience, and that could hurt him if Dzinziruk has anything left.