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Former world champion calls Jake Paul-Julio Cesar Chavez 'legitimate'
Former world champion Sergio Mora has voiced his support this weekend for the bout between Jake Paul and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr, calling the fight ‘legitimate’.
Mora, 29-5-2 (9), who held the WBC light-middleweight title in 2008, was speaking on DAZN’s The Fighter and the Writer podcast alongside journalist Chris Mannix.
Mora said that while he had received a lot of criticism for his past praise of Jake Paul, he thought that this weekend’s upcoming fight against Julio Cesar Chavez was a much-better bout than many boxing purists believe.
He went on: “Chavez Jr can take a big punch. He can give a big punch. That's all that you're going to need against Jake Paul, and he's going to have the size. He's going to be the same size, or even bigger, than Jake Paul, so he has that going for him. And it's a ten-round fight. This isn't going to be no Mike Tyson, 58-year-old, two-minute rounds where you're taking it light. No, no. This isn't going to be a Tommy fury type fight, where Tommy Fury never faced a real fighter with a winning record.”
He added: “This is going to be a legitimate fight for Jake Paul. And I give him credit for only having a dozen fights facing a former world champion. I don't care how faded he is. I don't care all the negatives. This is a real former champion going down on his resume. I give him credit for it.”
Mannix questioned the legitimacy of Chavez, pointing out that the last time Chavez was considered to be a viable threat was against middleweight champion Sergio Martinez in 2012. That fight, which Martinez won handily, saw Chavez stun the champion in the final round and nearly, as a result, forcing a stoppage.
The journalist pointed to the fact that Chavez, since the Martinez fight, has gained considerable weight and had issues with drugs and alcohol. Chavez, Mannix said, has also lost to Anderson Silva and squeaked a win over Uriah Hall.
Mannix added: “All that being said, I think people are really sleeping on Chavez in this matchup. When, when I go on social media and I see the responses to Julio Cesar Chavez Jr, it's just a lot of, ‘Another side show for Jake Paul’. This is being compared to what Jake had against Mike Tyson, but there is no comparison to that. Mike Tyson was 58 years old. Chavez Jr is 39.”
He went on: “The question I had coming into this fight week was, what were we going to see in Chavez? Were we going to see a guy that was struggling to make even the cruiserweight limit? Were we going to talk to a guy that just didn't seem to have the fire that was just there for a paycheque?”
Mora went on to acknowledge some of Chavez’s detriments, including his losses to Daniel Jacobs and Andrzej Fonfara, both of which came through retirements.
He said: “So this is a man that's never been knocked out, but he's found the way out twice, because when the going got tough against Fonfara, a naturally bigger fighter that he couldn't dominate, he quit.”
Mora also referred to Chavez’s loss against Daniel Jacobs in 2019, when he pulled out of the fight after the fifth round.
He said: “That's why he quit against Jacobs as well. You can question a lot of things of Chavez Jr: his conditioning, his motivation, his hunger for boxing. But you can't question his chin, and you can't question his body punching, that Mexican liver shot that he got from his dad.”
Jake Paul vs Julio Cesar Chavez Jr will be streamed exclusively on DAZN PPV, Saturday, June 28. Buy the PPV now here.
