By Thomas Gerbasi

The shoes were always going to be too big to fill. Maybe Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. knew it from the start, but if he didn’t, the rest of the boxing world certainly knew that he was never going to be his father.

“Nobody has even filled his shoes and we’re talking about a lot of great Mexican fighters that have come along in the last 20 years,” former Top Rank publicist Ricardo Jimenez, who worked closely with Chavez Jr. for years, told me in 2012. “And no one’s been able to even come close to him.”

In so many Mexican households for years, it was God then Chavez Sr., and anything that came after that really didn’t matter. And despite the exploits of Erik Morales, Marco Antonio Barrera, Ricardo Lopez, the Marquez brothers and Canelo Alvarez, among others, no one earned the level of adulation afforded to “El Gran Campeon Mexicano.”

So the son never had a chance, even though he was practically anointed for this from the time he was placed on a team member’s shoulders as a child and walked into the ring while his father prepared to do battle. Back then, Mexico came to a stop when Chavez fought, helping to keep the sport alive while Mike Tyson was in prison, and it was an intoxicating time for a youngster in the heart of the action.

“When I was going through that with my father, I dreamed about it,” Chavez Jr. said before his 2012 bout against Sergio Martinez. “I’d go ‘wow, what would it feel like to be the main guy, the one everyone wants to see, the one everybody’s watching?’”

He didn’t have to wonder for long. From the time of his pro debut in 2003, the spotlight was on, but as the victories piled up, he was more ridiculed than revered, with his level of opposition not even close to the level of hype. But his promoter at the time, Top Rank, moves a fighter better than anyone in the business, and with a raw talent like Chavez Jr., the move had to be slow.

“When I started without any amateur experience, it became a very difficult thing to do,” said Chavez. “All those fights that I took, I didn’t think it was going to be this hard, but you learn as you go along and the experience helps you. But at the beginning of my career, I thought it was more difficult than I expected and I worked a lot harder than I thought I was gonna need to.”

Eventually, his skills began to catch up to the attention he was getting, and when he beat John Duddy for the WBC silver middleweight title in 2010, there was the idea that he could become a special fighter.

That was almost seven years ago.

On May 6, he will engage in the biggest fight of his career against Alvarez, and while the bout will do big business both in Las Vegas’ T-Mobile Arena and on pay-per-view, it’s seen by many fans and pundits as a mere lucrative tune-up for Canelo before a hoped-for fight against middleweight king Gennady Golovkin.

Why?

“Because they know,” Alvarez said during a recent media teleconference. “They know based on my history, my discipline, my abilities, my talent, and obviously all the experts see that and they know.”

It’s been the knock on Chavez for years, that he lacks the discipline to be an elite fighter. He’s defeated quality opponents like Andy Lee and Marco Antonio Rubio, he’s won a world title, and he gave Sergio Martinez a late scare in their bout. But mention his name to a boxing fan, and the talk will be of his battles with the scale, his apparent refusal to alter his ways when it comes to weight maintenance, and his quitting against Andrzej Fonfara in 2015.

But the beauty of boxing is that one punch or one night can change everything. Talk to diehard Mexican fight fans and many of them will say that their head says Alvarez will win but their heart is rooting for Chavez. Through it all, the 31-year-old still has a loyal following hoping that on Saturday night, he finally gets it right.

He almost pulled it off against Martinez in 2012, dropping and nearly stopping the longtime champion in the 12th round after getting outboxed in the previous eleven, but the positive feedback from his strong finish was erased by a positive post-fight drug test for marijuana and a ballooning from 158 to 172 ½ pounds for his next fight against Brian Vera. The loss to Fonfara appeared to end his time at the top of the sport, and he agreed at times.

“It may have crossed my mind at some point, obviously after the Fonfara fight and the (Marcos) Reyes fight,” Chavez said on a Monday teleconference. “Those were two fights where I don't think that I had the same amount of passion that I needed to have.”

But with a name like his, there is always a payday to be had, and even though he’s the B-side to his countryman this week, Chavez took the fight. Skeptics will say he’s cashing in for the final time, but optimists believe that he’s got the fire needed to win, at least one more time. Again, he agrees.

“This fight is a lot different,” Chavez said. “This fight has created a lot of passion in me, a lot of enthusiasm, and I think that that's the difference in this. I’m excited about this fight, and I think that you're going to see a different Julio that's excited.”

That different Julio will presumably be bigger and stronger than Alvarez, and knowing that his rival will be right in front of him all night has to make him confident of scoring the upset. Add in the wizardry of Nacho Beristain in his corner, and the stage is set for a coronation we once thought we would see, but then expected never to happen.

No, he’ll never be his father. But no else will be either. So being Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. will have to be enough, and that name will be gold with a win on Saturday.

But it all depends on the man in the battle, bringing to mind the words of Burt Watson, former manager of Joe Frazier and a longtime UFC site coordinator, who used to tell fighters walking out to the Octagon, “It’s your night, your fight, get it right.”

Your move, Julio.