By Jim Dower: With the latest trend in boxing, WBC/WBO middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik (34-0, 30 KOs) has decided on facing a faded star of yesterday, in this case former middleweight champion Bernard Hopkins (48-5, 32 KOs), who is nearing his 44th birthday. The fight might have been supremely interesting eight to ten years ago when Hopkins was in his prime but as of now it’s hard to get excited about it other than the spectacle of it. In one corner you have Pavlik, 26, who is currently in his prime and by far the best fighter in the middleweight division, and in the other you have Hopkins, a fighter who is coming off of a narrow defeat to Joe Calzaghe but who has lost three out of his last five fights.

All things being equal, this would be a fight that Hopkins would be lucky to win even in his prime. However, he’s left his best years behind in the rear mirror years ago and is now sticking around the sport more like a spoiler, making fighters like Calzaghe struggle while at the same time beating pretenders. Pavlik, though, is anything but a pretender, and will be bringing huge power with him in the ring when the two meet on October 18th in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

It would seem that Pavlik has all the advantages on his side in this match-up: power, speed, work rate and stamina. The fight is pretty well tipped in his favor, all right. Although Hopkins is a tricky fighter, knowing how to slow down an opponent by clinching after every punch, it’s doubtful he’ll be able to clinch his way to a victory over Pavlik. For that matter, it’s also very unlikely that Hopkins will be able to make the fight nearly as close as he did with Calzaghe in April. That fight was only close because of the lack of power of Calzaghe, who was forced to match his annoying slapping-type punches with those of the harder power – but infrequent – shots from Hopkins.

In Pavlik’s case, he doesn’t ever stop punching and the shots he does throw are thrown with tremendous power. At 6’2″, Pavlik is slightly taller than the 6’1″ Hopkins, meaning that he’ll have to deal with a rare fighter that’s larger than him. Most of the time, Hopkins has the size advantage over his opponent. That won’t be the case with Pavlik, a tall fighter that uses his size by fighting at distance with power shots. That means that Hopkins is going to have to try and take the fight to Pavlik and hope that he can either hurt him with something big from his end or perhaps nullify his offense with his clinching.

Like I said, I doubt that Hopkins will be able to clinch enough to make the fight slow enough for him to win. He will, though, make the fight boring to watch and it may save him from being knocked out. If he doesn’t clinch often, and actually tries to fight Pavlik in a normal two-way fight, Hopkins wills surely be knocked out. He doesn’t have the armament of fighters like Edison Miranda, Jermain Taylor and Fulgencio Zuniga, fighters that Pavlik mowed down with power shots.

He also can’t hope to stand in with Pavlik and match him punch for punch, because as his last fight against Calzaghe showed, Hopkins no longer appears to have the stamina to fight hard for three minutes of ever round and needs breaks in order to rest. That’s one thing that Pavlik won’t be allowing him to do. In many ways, Pavlik is like a bigger, much stronger version of Antonio Margarito, a nonstop puncher who wears his opponents down with a rain of punches. His opponents might be able to keep up for two or three rounds, but after that point they start to wear down steadily. With Pavlik, it’s much quicker due to the immense power that he puts in every shot he throws.

Pavlik will probably destroy Hopkins by the 7th or 8th rounds after hurting him frequently with big right hands to the head. The clinching won’t help Hopkins a bit, and he’ll be met with a hail of hell fire coming at him from all angles from Pavlik. Due to his study chin, Hopkins will be able to take the shots for awhile but sooner or later it will become too much for him and he’ll succumb to the power, ending in a bloody mess. This will probably be the end of Hopkins’ career. I don’t see him continuing on after the beating he takes from Pavlik.