By Dan Ambrose: Former WBC light heavyweight Jean Pascal (29-2-1, 17 KOs) says he sees his upcoming March 14th title shot against IBF/WBA/WBO light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev (26-0-1, 23 KOs) as a fight similar to the movie Rocky IV. But instead of Pascal seeing himself in the Apollo Creed role where he gets smashed to bits by Russian Ivan Drago, Pascal sees himself as a black version of Rocky Balboa.
For the boxing fans who may have forgotten the plot, Drago kills Creed in the ring after giving him a vicious beating. Balboa then trains hard and takes on Drago and defeats him despite giving up a massive amount of size to the much bigger Drago.
The Kovalev-Pascal fight will be televised on HBO Championship Boxing from the Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada. Pascal, 32, will have the hometown advantage over the 31-year-old Kovalev. Whether that will help Pascal win the fight is still unknown. We can definitely expect Kovalev to be a lot more willing to engage with Pascal than Lucian Bute did in their fight last year in January.
Bute rarely threw any punches and he looked like he was just trying to not get knocked out. Kovalev will be a much different story for Pascal, and this could turn out to be a real disaster for Pascal if he’s not ready for a war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2alndUndQZc
We saw Pascal get worn down and beaten by Carl Froch in a war in their fight in 2008. Kovalev hits harder than Froch, so this could be a really bad fight for Pascal if he’s not ready to take a lot of hard head shots.
“This fight reminds me of Rocky IV and I think it’s going to be like a remake of the movie Rocky IV,” Pascal said. “You have the North American guy versus the Russian. You’ve got the East versus the West. You’ve got Drago, who killed Apollo Creed in the ring. Sergey Kovalev did the same thing maybe a couple of years ago. I am a huge underdog like Rocky was in the movie. The odds I think are about 4:1, but in this movie I’m not going to be Apollo Creed, I’m going to be the black Balboa.”
For Pascal to be another Balboa type of fighter, he’s going to need to be able to take a lot of punches from the Russian Kovalev in the same way that Balboa took a lot of shots from Drago. However, Pascal has never been one to take a lot of shots to the head without him backing off completely or getting staggered.
Pascal is coming off of a 2nd round no contest fight against Roberto Bolonti last December. This was a fight where Pascal hit Bolonti with a right hand rabbit punch while the two of them were in a clinch.
Bolonti then collapsed to the contest and couldn’t get up from the illegal blow. In hindsight, Pascal should have kept it clean by electing to throw punches in the legal portion of the head, because this put him in position where the fight could be ruled a no contest.
Also on the card are the following fights:
Steve Cunningham vs. Vyacheslav Glazkov
Joel Diaz Jr. vs. Kevin Lavallee
Comments are closed.