Pavlik-Mora: Why Is This PPV?
April 15th, 2009
By Dave Lahr: WBC/WBO middleweight Kelly Pavlik (35-1, 31 KOs) will be making his third defense of his titles against Sergio Mora (21-1-1, 5 KOs) on June 27th, at the Boardwalk Hall, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Rather than show the fight on regular Showtime or ESPN, the fight will be a PPV bout, meaning that boxing fans will have to pay big bucks to see this fight. Frankly, I don’t see Pavlik as being a PPV worthy star at this point in his career, especially now that he’s been soundly beaten by Bernard Hopkins in October 2008. That loss took a lot of wind out of the sails of Pavlik’s career, which at that point was just building up a little excitement.
It seems that Mora has been selected as an opponent to give Pavlik an easy win over a fighter with somewhat of a name in hopes of building up Pavlik for a potential bout with IBF middleweight champion Arthur Abraham. I see this as a waste of time, because Mora isn’t the kind of opponent that will make Pavlik look good.
On the contrary, Mora is a defensive fighter who specializes in making his opponents look clumsy and poor. If anything, Pavlik is going to come out of this fight in worse shape than ever.
I don’t doubt that he’ll win, but it won’t be by knockout or an impressive decision by any stretch of the imagination. Pavlik is a one-gear plodder and has little ability to move laterally or throw fast punches. 44-year-old Hopkins saw that which is why he was able to easily beat Pavlik.
Choosing Mora isn’t going to undo the damage to Pavlik’s reputation that was done by Hopkins, and it isn’t going to help make Pavlik a bigger star for a future fight with Abraham. It’s going to take a long time to turn around what Hopkins did to Pavlik, and realistically the only way that Pavlik can build up his stature is by fighting someone dangerous like Paul Williams.
The rest of the middleweights aside from Abraham, are almost worthless in terms of name value and talent. There are only a couple of them with real talent, and the rest are fighters that belong in the 2nd tier rather than the top 15. It shows you how bad the middleweight division is right now for them to be ranked in the top 15. However, Pavlik still should be going after the biggest names possible in the division rather than settling for fighters like Mora.
Pavlik needs to hook up life support to his career to try and make people forget his loss to Hopkins. The only way I see that happening is if he seeks out fighters like Williams, James Kirkland, Alfredo Angulo and Hassan N’Dam. Mora won’t do the trick and regardless of whether Pavlik defeats him or not, his status among boxing fans will remain unchanged.
Tags: 5 Responses to “Pavlik-Mora: Why Is This PPV?”
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I totally agree that Pavlik-Mora is not worthy of Pay Per View. It would be a stretch to say it was worthy of HBO or Showtime unless it had a couple of good undercard fights. Just another sign of why boxing is unable to climb out of the viewership slump. That said, the writer is being a bit over critical of Pavlik. There is valid criticism around choice of opponent. Lockett was pretty much a joke and Mora is a second tier fighter at best. Pavlik’s loss to Hopkins wasn’t so much a measure of Pavlik being a fraud as it was of Hopkin’s talent. The Ghost got schooled by one of the craftiest veterans in the game, not to mention that Hopkins was the bigger stronger fighter. I could see Pavlik putting a hurting on Mora. Mora is slick, but he gets careless sometimes and with a hard puncher like Pavlik any mistake can be costly.
pavlik at 168 and above is not ready yet maybe 2 years at 160 he as not gone 10 rounds which is very good he is only 27 give him time if he beats the best midd/weights in the next year they say to go up in weight which he is not ready in oct /nov it will be AA or williams
This is going to be a boring fight. Pavlik needs to hurry up and take on Abraham before he moves up to super-middleweight.
I think Pavlik will win unless Mora just picks him off and wins on points. Still a pointless broing fight!!
To be honest i could see Mora winning, only by hitting and running away, which he has pretty much done throughout his career unless Pavlik slows him down early
Pavlik hasnt looked particulary exciting since his Hopkins loss, hes still a little stale.
He still winning, getting the job done and all that but i dont think id pay to watch a post Hopkins Pavlik on PPV either.
If he blows this guy away and looks hungry, mean and hurtful like he used to be then maybe in his next fight id be willin to splash the cash.
But not after the last couple of average unexciting performences. Id still watch it if it wasnt PPV though as hes still a very good champion.