Pavlik vs. Mora in Summer

By Jim Dower: Although nothing has been signed as of yet, it appears that WBC/WBO middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik (35-1, 31 KOs) will be facing former reality television star from The Contender Sergio Mora (21-1-1, 5 KOs) in the Summer in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in a split site pay-per-view with Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. fighting Luciano Cuello in Mexico. It seems like a poor card, hardly one for PPV and more suited to ESPN or Friday Night Fights if you ask me.

It’s not that Mora and Chavez Jr. are bad fighters, because they obviously have some talent, but they both aren’t quite good enough to make the fight PPV. The worse part about this fight is that Mora, a former WBC light middleweight champion, is coming off a lopsided 12-round decision loss to Vernon Forrest in September.

Mora isn’t even ranked in the top 15 in the middleweight division, which makes it seem kind of silly for the fight to take place. Mora is ranked number #6 in the WBC light middleweight division, which I suppose is the rationale for Pavlik wanting to fight him. He’s popular with a certain segment of the population in the U.S., most notably around the Los Angeles area in California.

However, his fights are painfully boring to watch with a lot of running, jabs and pot shots thrown. He was able to defeat an under-trained Forrest in June 2008 to capture the WBC light middleweight title briefly. However, a motivated – an in shape – Forrest easily avenged his defeat with a 12 round dominating performance over Mora in the rematch three months later in September 2008.

Pavlik, 26, has done precious little since defeating Jermain Taylor in back to back fights in 2007 and 2008. Instead of going after an appealing fighter like Arthur Abraham, Pavlik chose to fight British middleweight Gary Lockett in his first defense of his WBC/WBO middleweight titles in June 2008, and easily stopped him in three rounds.

Next up, Pavlik fought 44 year-old Bernard Hopkins in a 170 pound catch weight fight in October 2008, resulting in Pavlik getting trounced in a 12-round decision loss. Following this, Pavlik defended his middleweight titles against Marco Antonio Rubio in February 2009, beating him by a 9th round stoppage.

Boxing fans had hoped that Pavlik would have gotten his easy fights out of his system and taken on someone more credible like Abraham or Felix Sturm or even John Duddy. The middleweight division has few stars, however, which is a sad fact about the division. Mora, as bad as he is, is probably easily better known than most of the mediocre talent that inhabits the middleweight division.

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