By Dan Ambrose: According to fightnews.com, WBC middleweight champion Sergio Martinez (50-2-2, 28 KO’s) will be having surgery on Monday on his injured right knee, and if everything goes well with recovery from the surgery the 37-year-old Martinez will be fighting next in his native country of Argentina in the first quarter of 2013.

What this means, of course, is that Martinez will not be fighting an immediate rematch with the hulking former WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. nor will Martinez be fighting the Golden Boy Promotions fighter WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez on May 5th of next year. That’s got to hurt Alvarez and Golden Boy, because it now narrows Alvarez’s choices for the May 5th fight date to Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Miguel Cotto.

You can expect that to be narrowed even further if Cotto gets beaten by WBA World junior middleweight champion Austin Trout next month on December 1st. Alvarez’s only choice could be Mayweather, and I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that fight to happen.

Martinez defeated a huge looking Chavez Jr. by a 12 round unanimous decision on September 15th of this year in a pretty much one-sided fight. The only round where Chavez Jr. had any success was in the 12th round when he was able to knock Martinez down after hurting him with a right hand. The knockdown has encouraged enough boxing fans to want to see the two fight again despite the mostly one-sided nature of the fight. I guess Chavez Jr’s fans are gluttons for punishment because the rematch could very well be as one-sided as the first fight, if not more. Chavez Jr. should take the advice of World Boxing Council president Jose Sulaiman and go in a different direction rather than choose to fight Martinez again because nothing good could come of a second fight unless Chavez Jr. is only interested in the payday.

It’s unclear who Martinez could lure go come over to Argentina to fight him. I imagine he’ll take a less than tough opponent for this fight because it’ll be his first fight back after knee surgery. There’s honestly not a lot of choices available for Martinez in the top 15 that the WBC has ranked. A bunch of less than popular fighters from top to bottom. I would say Jermain Taylor would be an interesting fight for the purposes of a spectacle but he’s rumored to be fighting Peter Quillin on January 19th.