Martinez searches for big-time foe
It would be easy to say that rare is the superstar boxer who finds himself in the plight that Ring middleweight champion Sergio Martinez faces.
Martinez is one of boxing's most gifted fighters and is ranked third in the Yahoo! Sports poll. He's an entertaining scrapper who scored five knockdowns of a very difficult Sergiy Dzinziruk in his last outing.
He's got a model's looks and attracts women easily. He should be a marketer's dream.
And yet, he's in an eerily similar place as heavyweight champions Wladimir and Vitali Klitschko. He is so good that, if he gets past Darren Barker in his HBO-televised bout from Atlantic City, N.J.'s Boardwalk Hall on Saturday, he will have no legitimate first-rate competition.
His promoter, Lou DiBella, has been reduced to singing the praises of Martinez's opponents in his last two outings in a largely vain effort to build some interest in the bouts. Just as with the Klitschko brothers, Martinez is expected to win big and without incident.
DiBella is offering every sort of discount imaginable, yet he'll be lucky to have 5,000 people in the arena on Saturday.
Rival promoter Bob Arum, whose own middleweight champion, World Boxing Council champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., has a belt that is as legitimate as a trinket purchased at Toys R Us, has been routinely bashing Martinez.
DiBella's efforts to drum up interest in Saturday's fight has been complicated by the presence of baseball playoff games in New York, 120 miles away, and in Philadelphia, 60 miles away, that will attract huge crowds.
"There will be 50,000 people sitting in each stadium and those are my two biggest markets [for this fight]," DiBella said glumly.
Barker is 23-0 with 14 knockouts, but he's largely unknown outside of the U.K. Martinez is the first recognizable fighter he's fought, though that's no stroke against him since there are so few quality middleweights around these days.
DiBella has been urging American boxing writers who haven't seen Barker before to watch clips of him on YouTube.
"This guy [Barker] is a real fighter and Sergio gets that," DiBella said. "He was a terrific amateur. He is unbeaten as a pro. He has everything to gain from this fight and nothing to lose. For Sergio, it's the opposite. If he beats Barker, who in this country is going to run around screaming about what a significant win it is? But if he loses, you can imagine what's going to be said. It's a no-win situation for Sergio. And frankly, I'm scared as [expletive] about this fight."
Martinez is 36 and stranger things have happened to 36-year-old boxers than to be upset by an unbeaten, unknown and motivated opponent who is seven years his junior. Martinez, though, is a brilliant athlete whose body always looks as if it were chiseled from granite.
He's not a huge middleweight, but if he gets past Barker on Saturday, he may have to do what for a 160-pound champion is just about unthinkable in order to get a big fight: Cut 10 more pounds.
Martinez said he'll agree to a catch weight of 150 pounds if it would help him land a bout against either pound-for-pound champion Manny Pacquiao or runner-up Floyd Mayweather Jr.
"Pacquiao fought [Antonio] Margarito at 150, so I would go there and he could fight me," said Martinez, who conceded it would be extraordinarily difficult to get to 150. "If that's what it takes to get a big fight, I'll do it."
After Pacquiao's win over Margarito, Top Rank matchmaker Bruce Trampler put a kibosh on future moves up in weight for the Pacman. Pacquiao began his career at 106 pounds and found it physically difficult against a large man like Margarito.
Trampler, a member of the International Boxing Hall of Fame and arguably the greatest matchmaker in history, told Arum and Top Rank president Todd duBoef that to keep putting Pacquiao in against men as big, or bigger, than Margarito would be the wrong move and would significantly shorten his career.
Though Pacquiao holds the World Boxing Organization welterweight title, he's never weighed as much as 146 in a bout.
Mayweather, who started his pro career as a 130-pounder, has never weighed more than 152 a day in his life, even outside of boxing.
It would seem unlikely that either man would be interested in a match with Martinez.
That leaves Martinez as a top-flight talent with essentially nowhere to go, much like the Klitschko brothers at heavyweight.
"I think there are some similarities there," Martinez said. "I want the big fights, but what can I do if they aren't there?"
He'll have to do what the Klitschko brothers do, which is to rout the challengers he does face and hope that sooner or later someone emerges as a star in the division that would allow him to make a big fight.
Even if he holds up his end, however, it's unlikely that major challenger is going to come along.
His best hope might be for Margarito to defeat Miguel Cotto in their super welterweight title bout on Dec. 3 in New York and then move up to middleweight for a shot at the belt.
It's not the ideal scenario for an elite champion to be in, but it's modern boxing.
Martinez doesn't particularly love it, but he's come to terms with it.
"The bottom line is that ll I can do is win my fights and fight the best guys who are willing to fight me," Martinez said. "As fighters, the only thing we can control is how we prepare and how we perform. The one thing I can promise is that I'm very prepared for this fight and I'm ready to give a great performance. Other than that, I don't know what else to say."
The sad part is, no one else does, either.
