Chavez Jr. can beat Canelo says Julio Sr.

Boxingnews24.com

By Dan Ambrose: Julio Cesar Chavez Sr. says his son Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (50-2-1, 32 KOs) can defeat Saul “Canelo” Alvarez with a with a good plan for their fight next month on May 6 on HBO PPV at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. The 30-year-old Chavez Jr. took the fight with Canelo for reasons of pride instead of money says Chavez Sr. If the money was Chavez Jr’s main reason for accepting the fight, then they wouldn’t have taken it.

The tricky part for Chavez Jr. for this fight with Canelo is the 164 ½” catch-weight. Chavez Jr. might be able to beat Canelo if he’s at his optimal weight and is in great shape, but he might not be able to do it if he’s weakened by the weight requirements for this fight. Golden Boy Promotions must have thought long and hard in coming up with the 164.5lb catch-weight limit.

Canelo is clearly big enough to make the full 168lb weight limit for the fight, as he;s said to rehydrate into the mid-170s for his catch-weight fights at 155. The 164.5lb catch-weight is arguably a tool to weaken Chavez Jr. It’s too bad things like this are needed, because you didn’t see old school fighters like Alexis Arguello, Salvador Sanchez and Roberto Duran using catch-weights o get an edge on their opponents.

Chavez isn’t revealing what the game plan is for Chavez Jr. for this fight, but it likely will involve him using his size and power to smash the 26-year-old Canelo. Body punching will likely be a key for Chavez Jr., because he’s a very good body puncher, and Canelo doesn’t get hit to the body. Canelo has been matched against only head hunters in the last 10 years of his career.

“(Julio) accepted it for the pride, because it knows that it is a fight important for its race, knows what it represents for ‘Canelo’ and what Canelo has done,” said Chavez to ESPN Deportes. ”Julio knows that being well prepared, with a well thought out plan, he can beat Canelo or anyone,” said Chavez.

I don’t know if Chavez Jr. can beat just anyone when he’s at his best, but he might be able to defeat Canelo. He’s not very big at 5’9”, and he might be even shorter. When Canelo fought the 5’8” Floyd Mayweather Jr. in 2013, the two of them were the same height. Canelo might be just a bigger version of Miguel Cotto. You can argue that Canelo is this era’s version of Cotto, but with more weight on him. At his best, Chavez Jr. would likely have stopped Cotto if the two of them ever fought each other.

We saw what Antonio Margarito did to Cotto. Chavez Jr. would probably do just as good a job of bludgeoning bloody and battered Cotto into submission. Chavez Jr. might be able to use his size to chop down Canelo if he doesn’t get clipped with something. Canelo was getting hit a lot in his last fight against Liam Smith last September. Smith ran out of gas and ended up seeing stopped. If he’d kept throwing punches at a high rate, he might have given Canelo real problems.

“Since we accepted this fight, I always saw possibilities for Julio,” said Chavez about the anelo fight. ”This fight is not for money. If it had been for money, we would not have accepted it,” said Chavez.

Chavez Jr. and his trainer Nacho Beristain reportedly had a difference of opinion about Junior’s decision to want to depart from Otomí Training Center early to go to Las Vegas. Beristain told Chavez Jr. that he wanted him to stay at the Otomi training center instead of leaving for Las Vegas, because he felt that it would hurt all the training that they’d done up to this point. Beristain got his way.
“So, Julio has looked good in the gym but there are things that he should be doing better. Julio is a bit bipolar so at this moment everything is OK,” said Chavez Jr. to ESPN Deportes via Fight News.

Chavez Sr. says that his Chavez Jr. sometimes wants to do things his own way, and that can make things a little challenging. He says he’s in good shape right now at this time. Hopefully he can stay that way for the remainder of his camp. This is obviously been a hard camp for Chavez Jr. because he’s got a very tough opponent he’s dealing with in Canelo.

If Chavez Jr. is in great shape for the Canelo fight, it might be all he needs to get him across the finish line. You have to remember that it’s been at least 5 years since Chavez Jr. was in great shape for his fight against Andy Lee. We haven’t seen the best of Chavez Jr. for a long, long time. When Chavez Jr. is at his best, he’s more than capable of giving a small guy like Canelo all he can handle.

We don’t know how good Canelo is because he hasn’t been matched against a truly quality fighter form his own weight class since his questionable win over Erislandy Lara in 2014. The best guy Canelo has fought since that time was little 5’7” Miguel Cotto, who clearly isn’t even close to being as big as the 6’0” Chavez Jr. Cotto, 36, is a lot older than both Chavez Jr. and Cotto. Canelo proved nothing in his win over Cotto other than he can beat an older part-time fighter, who lacked the size and youth to beat him.

“Everything is going well according to what Julio has done in the past, but he’s not exactly where I want him to be,” said Chavez. “Julio is the type of person that won’t follow instructions. If you tell him to run at 8 am he runs at 10 am. If you tell him to spar six rounds, he spars more rounds or less rounds.”

That doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement by Chavez of his son Julio Jr., but like I said, it might not matter. As long as Chavez Jr. is in shape, not weight-drained, and highly motivated, he might be able to pull off an upset on May 6.