By Dave Lahr: Just how does a fighter react after getting the living day lights beaten out of them? It’s always a mystery and different with every fighter. Middleweight Kelly Pavlik will be under a microscope tomorrow night in his WBC/WBO middleweight title match against Marco Antonio Rubio. Pavlik was beaten badly by Bernard Hopkins in October 2008, the kind of beating that often turns a fighter into jelly afterwards, shaping their career for the negative.
It’s a rare fighter that can overcome a loss as badly as Pavlik’s loss. Some people may say that a knockout loss is worse, and it can be when it causes lasting neurological problems to the brain, but equally as bad is a fighter that is beaten systematically for 12 rounds.
Not only does that fighter take a lot of punishment to the head in the way of hard blows, but they also get beaten in such a manner that they began to doubt themselves. Some fighters are able to comeback after a terrible beating and get stronger, using it as a learning tool.
Fighters like Evander Holyfield and George Foreman come to mind, although with Foreman, he reacted badly after a loss to Jimmy Young in 1977, stepping away from the sport for 10 years before picking it back up. Yet when a fighter is beaten really badly in the way that Pavlik was beaten, I’d have to say that I know of only a few cases where they were able to be successful for long without getting beaten again a short time later. It’s almost as if the loss becomes ingrained, making it more likely that they lose again in the future.
Even though Pavlik fights tomorrow night, we probably won’t know how badly he was damaged in the Hopkins fight because Rubio isn’t much of a threat, and is essentially tailor made for Pavlik. Rubio looked very average in beating Enrique Ornelas in the WBC title eliminator match last time out, looking nothing like a future title contender.
This is the type of fighter that even a battered and diminished Pavlik can probably take out without much trouble. However, what comes later is the real question for Pavlik, because when he eventually gets past the Rubio and John Duddy type fighters, he’s going to have to prove himself against a real middleweight with talent, someone like Arthur Abraham and when that time comes, we may see him looking timid, and a step slow.
Where will he be mentally when he finally takes on a real threat? Will he go to pieces like he did against Hopkins, crumbling mentally early on and making no adjustments as he loses round after round. I think we may see that same fighter emerge when that time comes.
What he was in the past, he’ll probably be again. People repeat patterns in their lives when presented with stress, and I think Pavlik may break down when he’s put in with a good fighter in the future instead of the pitiful fodder that mostly exists in the division at this time.