Julio Cesar Chavez Jr Facing Marco Antonio Rubio on February 4

Rubio earned his shot, and is the toughest fight of Jr’s career. I want to see it. It looks like a better fight than Martinez vs Chavez anyway.

But yeah, the WBC is a collection of crooks. Always have been and always will be.

Quite like this one. To be honest if you stay in and around the top 10 at middleweight there arent a hell of a lot of bad fights to be made. The problem with Martinez will always be that his earning potential will never match up to how good he is, so the cynical side of me almost thinks why should JCC take on a guarenteed loss to earn slightly more than he would for takin a much easier fight. In a perfect world where everyone was nice and farts smelt like bacon sandwhiches he should probably take the best fight out there but Rubio is still a good one

Rubio will still be tough for Chavez Jr. It’s no gimme fight. If he loses to Rubio, his stock plummets. If he loses to Martinez, it’s losing to a top 5 p4p fighter, so who cares? Why not just vacate belt and continue to fight average competition. Don’t risk losing until the time is right. This is another big fight for Martinez that won’t end up happening, which means he really has to look outside of Top Rank and Pretty Boy Floyd for a big fight. He needs to learn that it just ain’t happening. No Cotto. No Chavez Jr. No Pac. No Floyd. Bottom line.

It wasn’t that long ago that everybody was crying about how Rubio would never get a shot because Chavez would duck him – like Rubio all of a sudden had became this terrifying middleweight monster. When Chavez beats him, this nonsense can be laid to rest thankfully.

Rubio is Chavez Jr.’s toughest test. He earns his stripes if he gets by Rubio. Frankly, although I thought the decision against Zbik was debatable, to continue the comparison with Canelo, Rubio and Zbik are tougher opponents than the current Shane Mosley and Kermit Cintron, by far.

Do we all agree that Chavez Jr. blatantly ducked Sergio Martinez?

That point is well-taken. However, I just thought I would mention that Chavez Jr. is ranked number 6 by ESPN and Ring Magazine so there’s not quite the disparity in ranking as indicated in your post. Didn’t most people say Povetkin ducked Wladimir? I know I did. Isn’t this comparable?

I don’t think this will be that competitive. I don’t see what Rubio can do to Chavez unless Chavez doesn’t come in condition to go 12.

The problem with the “Oh I thought we weren’t supposed to care about belts” defense of Chavez is the fact that it relies on a false dichotomy, that belts are either meaningless or they’re not. One can easily hope that belts will one day be unanimously seen as the useless paper weights they are while at the same time realizing that they’re still clearly significant tools in the boxing world today.

Almost all fans recognize that the corruption and favoritism regularly displayed by the sanctioning bodies means that they’re pretty damn far from the last word on who’s the best in a given division. In a perfect world everyone would regard them with the proper disdain they deserve.

The fact of the matter however is that precisely not everyone shares this disdain today, and many of those who do not are those that actually have to make their living in the sport. Many fighters still ascribe a high value to them, not to mention the fact that they still make for very valuable tools for both promoting fights and for securing enough leverage to get fights made. We can yell all we want that The Ring belt is all that should matter, but the problem is that The Ring belt almost never actually facilitates fights getting made; it merely attaches some bit of legitimacy on the victor after the fact. Simply dismissing any claim of impropriety on the part of sanctioning bodies on the basis that such fighters should know better or that belts should be recognized as meaningless anyway does not make for an adequate response to such claims, nor does it make any more likely that the sanctioning bodies will finally be reduced to the complete irrelevance they so rightly deserve.

This point is perhaps less applicable to this particular case; Martinez will obviously continue to be paid well by HBO, even if he doesn’t get the Chavez blockbuster. That being said, I still find it problematic that the default response many times to a fighter claiming that a sanctioning body has screwed him over is aways along the lines of “No shit, that’s what he gets for dealing with those people.” The problem is very often for up-and-coming fighters, there’s no choice but to deal with those people.

that if Jermain Taylor wins a couple of fights and Sergio Martinez continues to win that Lou Dibella will match Sergio Martinez and Jermain Taylor in the near future in a relatively big money fight? Jermain is a name and he’s also not with Top Rank.

should be an exciting night of boxing..shiuld be jr’s best test to date..and nonito vs papito should be fun as long as it goes on..i dont care if vasquez gets koed but at least he’ll fight unlike narvaez. it will be interesting to see nonito at 122 fight someone kind of hiz size