The atmosphere is heating up between Sergio Martinez and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr ahead of their WBC middleweight title clash.
Boxing rivals promise punishment ahead of Saturday's bout
With one fighter promising punishment and the other warning his opponent to prepare for retirement, Saturday's WBC middleweight title fight between Sergio Martinez and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr looks set to be an explosive affair.
At the final pre-fight news conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Martinez, 37, told reporters that he had "trained a long time dancing".
He added: "That's all I need to break his face a thousand times. I will punish him a lot and then I will knock him out. He will suffer a lot."
Unsurprisingly, Chavez Jr predicted a different outcome for his rival when they meet on Saturday at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas.
"I'm not only going to beat you, I'm going to retire you," the 26-year-old told the Argentine.
Having watched tapes of his opponent, Chavez Jr mockingly added: "I have seen when he was knocked out or knocked down and his eyes were white. He looked pretty good."
Rivalry
The beginning of the bad blood between the two fighters can be traced back to the highly different paths they each took before reaching this point in their careers.
Chavez Jr (46-0-1), the son of Mexico's most famous and celebrated fighter, turned professional at the age of 17 and made his Las Vegas debut in his fifth bout.
Having not visited a boxing gym until he was 20, Martinez (49-2-2) spent the first ten years of his career fighting in Argentina and Spain.
After relocating to the USA in 2007, the fighter found success after defeating Kelly Pavlik in the 2010 WBC middleweight championship.
However, the WBC stripped him of that belt last year when he elected to fight Ukraine's Sergiy Dzinziruk instead of mandatory challenger Sebastian Zbik of Germany.
Chavez Jr then assumed the title with a majority decision win over the German.
Ever since, Martinez has been campaigning for a fight with the Mexican, asserting that "the only reason he is world champion is because he is Julio Cesar Chavez Jr, the son of the legend and his mouth is so big, even bigger than his own brain and he's talking too much."
But his opponent has hit back to the taunts with insults of his own, stating that he is "going to shut him up once and for all" as well as claiming that the Argentine is "just a big clown."
