Chavez Jr-Vera II brings in 1.390 mil viewers on HBO

By Boxing News - 03/04/2014 - Comments

chavez733By Dan Ambrose: HBO must be feeling pretty pleased with their ratings last Saturday night in the Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (48-1-1, 32 KO’s) vs. Brian Vera (23-8, 14 KO’s) rematch at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas. The Chavez Jr-Vera hauled in 1.390 million viewers with a high of 1.531 million on HBO, and the co-feature bout between Orlando Salido and Vasyl Lomachenko brought in 1.017 million viewers.

Chavez Jr. won the fight by a 12 round unanimous decision by the scores of 114-113, 117-110, 117-110. In terms of excitement, it was a lot more appealing than the previous fight between them that took place last year in September.

It’s nice that Chavez Jr. can bring in good ratings even when he’s not facing a popular fighter like Vera. You can just imagine the kind of ratings a fight between Chavez Jr. and Gennady Golovkin or Carl Froch might bring in later in the year. Chavez Jr. will be back in July against an opponent still to be determined. He had hoped to fight Golovkin next, but that fight can’t happen yet because Golovkin is back in his home country of Kazakhstan following the sudden death of his father. Chavez Jr. will likely face a well known but beatable super middleweight or possibly another middleweight.

If Chavez Jr. fights another middleweight than it’ll be a pretty good sign that his promoter Bob Arum is reluctant to put Chavez Jr. in with a guy with the kind of talent that can beat him. Based on how competitive his two fights were against Vera, there’s a good chance that Chavez Jr. would be beaten by a number of the top super middleweights in the division. While he could probably handle the likes of James DeGale and Sakio Bika, Chavez Jr. would likely be beaten by guys like Andre Ward, Carl Froch, George Groves and Mikkel Kessler. Those guys are to solid to be beaten by him, and they have good power of their own.

Golovkins is probably too good for Chavez Jr. as well. A fight between Chavez Jr. and Golovkin would likely be very similar to Chavez Jr’s one-sided loss to Sergio Martinez, but without Golovkin getting hurt in the 12th round the way that Martinez was. It would be pretty brutal to picture the damage that Golovkin would do to Chavez Jr’s face over the course of the fight. Golovkin’s opposition are usually faily good at getting out of the way of punches, but Chavez Jr. is one of those guys that is there to be hit. If you give Golovkin an easy target to land his big power shots then he’s going to massacre his opponents.



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