By Scott Gilfoid: Promoter Eddie Hearn says that Top Rank, the promoters for former WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez (46-1-1, 32 KO’s), want a catchweight fight between Chavez Jr. and Hearn’s fighter former EBU middleweight champion Darren Barker (25-1, 16 KO’s) on June 22nd in Mexico.
In other words, the fight would be above the 160 pound limit, presumably because Chavez Jr. is having a hard time getting down to the 160 pound limit. Having seen Chavez Jr. working out lately, I can understand why the need for the catchweight.
Chavez Jr. looks to be over 200 pounds, and it’s hard to imagine him dropping all that weight to get down to 160. Chavez Jr. doesn’t look fat. He just looks like a small heavyweight/cruiserweight. The weight will come off but I don’t think Chavez Jr. will be able to get down to 160 to make the middleweight limit. It would be a fight that would be held at super middleweight.
Hearn said to Sky Sports News “They’ve [Top Rank] talked about a catchweight but we want to take that fight as close to the middleweight limit as possible. It’s a fight that Darren believes he can win.”
I don’t think it’s a fight that Barker can win, especially if there’s a catchweight involved to where Chavez Jr. will be scaling in at 164 or 165 for the weigh-in. If Chavez Jr. weighs that match for the weigh-In, you can only imagine how heavy he’d be for the actual fight. Using a conservative estimate of Chavez Jr. putting 20 pounds of water weight back on after the weigh-in, we’re talking about him weighing 185 pounds for the fight.
The reality is it would be Chavez Jr. coming into the fight as a cruiserweight, and Barker would be crushed by someone that big. But if Chavez Jr. puts on more than 20 pounds, we could see him in the 190 region and that would be just be an insane amount of weight.
Barker can’t compete against a cruiserweight-sized fighter like Chavez Jr. I don’t care how good Barker looked in winning his last two fights since being taken out in the 11th round by Sergio Martinez in October 2011; it’s just too much weight for Barker to deal with.
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