DAZN have added another card to their schedule for this week, picking up U.S. rights to Friday’s card from Tijuana, which will feature Julio Cesar Chavez and Jorge Arce meeting in a third exhibition bout in the main event, plus the return of Julio Cesar Chavez Jr on the card, as well.
The elder Chavez, now 58, has fought the now 41-year-old Arce in a pair of exhibition bouts before. This one will take place behind closed doors, and is really mostly just for the curious. It might possibly give you some idea what to expect before you plunk down money for the Tyson-Jones exhibition in November, which is definitely going to happen, for sure.
The frankly more meaningful fight will be between the 34-year-old junior Chavez (51-4-1, 33 KO), who will face Mario Cazares (11-0, 5 KO) in a 10-round light heavyweight bout. Chavez hasn’t fought since his debacle effort last December against Daniel Jacobs, where he barely got licensed after having to move the fight from Nevada to Arizona in the first place, then badly blew weight and quit after five rounds, starting a ruckus in the crowd where angry spectators got into fights of their own and rained garbage down on anyone near the ring.
A former middleweight titleholder from 2011-12, Chavez’s name has been about the only thing keeping him relevant since he was schooled by Sergio Martinez in 2012. He’s 5-3 since then, but has lost pretty clearly to the three best fighters he’s faced in that time, and even struggled in two of the wins, both over Bryan Vera.
Cazares, 30, is unbeaten but completely untested, never fighting higher than a club level since turning pro in 2015. It will be interesting to see if Chavez bothers to make weight, but with his team pretty much in control of the event, they can really just say the weight is whatever he weighs in at, which is kind of what they tried to do last year with Jacobs, but that was a much bigger event.
Anyway, we’ll have live coverage on Friday, so add it to a busy week, where we’ll have live coverage for six events between Wednesday and Saturday.