By Allan Fox: As reported at Doghouseboxing.com last Saturday, former WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (46-1-1, 32 KO’s) will be giving the boot to trainer Freddie Roach and replacing him with the 73-year-old Boxing Hall of Fame trainer Nacho Beristain to steer his career hopefully towards better waters in 2013 and beyond.
With Roach at the helm, Chavez Jr. won 6 of 7 fights, including the World Boxing Council 160 pound title. However, Chavez Jr. met defeat recently in a fight against Sergio Martinez and that appears to be the catalyst for Roach being dumped in favor of the 73-year-old Beristain.
You have to think of this as an experiment because I have a feeling that Beristain won’t be the magic that gets Chavez Jr. past Martinez in a rematch next year in September, and once Chavez Jr. loses again it’s difficult to imagine him sticking it out with Beristain for much longer.
Chavez Jr’s problems are many. He’s simply too big and sluggish for the middleweight division, and while his huge 180-190 pound frame is ideal for overpowering the much, much smaller stationary middleweights that he comes across, he was exposed as being unable to fight on the move against a mobile middleweight in Martinez.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that Chavez Jr. can’t continue to find success against most of the other middleweights, but there’s going to come a time real soon where every fighter that he faces will be looking to follow the blueprint that Martinez created by using quick movement to out-box Chavez Jr.
Beristain’s job is going to be tough because he’s not going to be able make the huge cruiserweight sized Chavez Jr. into a fighter that can fight on the move, because he’s simply fighting in the wrong weight class. Let’s be real, Chavez Jr. should be a cruiserweight or at the minimum a light heavyweight, but he’s somehow found a way to lost huge amounts of water to enable him to fight in a division way below his natural weight.
This gives him a huge boost against fighters that can’t move very well to avoid being worn down by the much heavier Chavez Jr., but it’s not going to work against faster middleweights with foot movement. Beristain is going to have to do the best he can to try and fix this problem for Chavez Jr. otherwise he could taste defeat again.
I don’t imagine Chavez Jr. will be open to moving up to light heavyweight or cruiserweight, because he reportedly said no to that idea when Roach brought it up to him recently. All you can really hope for is that Chavez Jr. doesn’t look too bad in the Martinez rematch because if he loses again, I think Beristain will be given a quick exit.
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