By Marcus Richardson: Sergio Martinez may have to wait a lot longer before he gets a shot at WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (44-0-1, 31 KO’s) because the talk is that Chavez Jr. will opt to fight WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (37-2, 30 KO’s) in the Summer rather than face Martinez, as the WBC is hoping he does.
Chavez Jr. has to win his fight next month against #1 WBC ranked middleweight contender Marco Antonio Rubio (53-5-1, 46 KO’s) for the Chavez-Cotto fight to happen but there’s a better than average chance that Chavez Jr. will get by Rubio without any problems to get the Cotto payday fight. Chavez’s promoters at Top Rank and his trainer Freddie Roach has done their research of Rubio, and likely see him as someone that Chavez Jr. can handle as long as he’s careful.
Rubio didn’t look great in his fight with David Lemieux until the Canadian fighter ran out of gas on his own simply from hitting Rubio in the head and the body repeatedly. All Rubio did was take the shots, and it wasn’t impressive performance from him despite getting the win.
Both Cotto and Chavez Jr. fight for Top Rank and this is the fight that their promoter Bob Arum has been waiting on for a long time. He’s not going to let Martinez ruin his plans to seeing that fight fulfilled. For it to be a big cash money fight, Chavez Jr. must be unbeaten. Once he has a loss, that fight won’t be as interesting to fans.
As for Martinez, he can’t do much other than sit on the sidelines and watch Chavez Jr. As long as the WBC chooses to let Chavez Jr. bypass Martinez each time, then he’s nothing he can do. Recently, the WBC ordered Chavez Jr. to fight Martinez next. However, it didn’t take much for Chavez Jr. to get the WBC to change their mind about that and sanction his fight with Rubio instead. Supposedly, they let Chavez Jr. take this one fight and then he has to fight Martinez. But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to guess that the WBC will again choose to let Chavez Jr. ignore Martinez once again after the Rubio fight.
But even if they do try and force the issue, Chavez Jr. will likely vacate the WBC belt and fight Cotto anyway. So there’s really not much that you can do to get Chavez Jr. to fight Martinez. If he doesn’t want it, his promoter doesn’t want it and if the WBC isn’t going to do anything to make it happen, then Martinez will be ignored for the remainder of his career. Is it fair? No, and yeah, it makes the WBC look bad, like an organization with no teeth, but this is boxing.