By Dan Ambrose: Last weekend’s fight between WBC middleweight champion Sebastian Zbik (30-1, 10 KO’s) and challenger Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (43-0-1, 30 KO’s) brought in huge numbers in terms of viewers on HBO, according to news from Dan Rafael on his twitter page.

The Chavez-Zbik fight brought in an incredible 1.5 million viewers for the Saturday bout, making it the most viewed HBO Boxing After Dark (BAD) main event card since the Paulie Malignaggi vs. Lovemore Ndou fight back in June 2007. That tells you what kind of draw Chavez Jr. is because this was the only big named fighter on the entire card and his opponent Zbik was virtually an unknown fighter to the casual boxing fans in the United States.

Chavez Jr. won the fight by a 12 round majority decision in a hard fought and closely contested fight. Chavez Jr. trailed early on but then wore Zbik down with a powerful body attack in the 2nd half of the fight to get the win. For Chavez Jr., this is the second consecutive fight for him that has drawn huge ratings. His bout last January against fringe contender Billy Lyell also brought in big viewer ratings.

Now that Chavez Jr. has established that he can bring in good ratings on HBO the trick is for Chavez’s game to be improved enough to where his promoter Bob Arum can make Chavez Jr. a pay per view star with the American public. Given that Chavez Jr. barely beat Zbik, a fighter that a lot of boxing fans saw as a weak paper champion, Arum may have his work cut out for him in improving Chavez enough to where he can hold onto his WBC title long enough to cash in on his popularity among fans in the U.S market.

If Arum puts Chavez Jr. in with the best middleweights right now like Sergio Martinez and Dmitriy Pirog, Chavez Jr. will likely get decimated. Chavez Jr. also has a problem with his size. He weighed 180 lbs. the night of the Zbik fight, and that tells you that Chavez Jr. may be forced to move up in weight to the super middleweight division in a year or two. At super middleweight, Chavez Jr. likely would out of his class in terms of talent. Those fighters are much better than what Chavez Jr. has shown. Even with the great trainer Freddie Roach working on trying to improve him it’s doubtful that Chavez Jr. would ever be more than a contender at super middleweight. If Arum can improve Chavez Jr. enough where he can beat some of the contenders that he has lined up waiting for a title shot, he might be able to turn Chavez Jr. into a halfway decent PPV attraction.