By Dave Lahr: On February 21st, WBC/WBO middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik (34-1, 30 KOs) will be facing a mirror image of himself in the form of Mexican challenger Marco Antonio Rubio (43-4-1, 37 KOs) at the Chevrolet Centre, in Youngstown, Ohio. Rubio, 28, is every bit as powerful as Pavlik, and holds the potential to stop Kelly with each hand. Though Rubio isn’t well known to many casual boxing fans, he’s very much a real threat to knock Pavlik unlike Bernard Hopkins who recently embarrassed Pavlik with a lopsided 12-round decision victory in October.
Rubio, 6’1”, has knocked out six of his last seven opponents with his huge right and left hand power and he’s coming off an impressive 12-round decision victory over Enrique Ornelas in October. Rubio’s 7th round bludgeoning of the hard-hitting Jose Luis Zertuche in February was plain sick, the way that Rubio took him apart with one sledge hammer right hand after another until finally Zertuche collapsed into the ropes in the 7th and the fight was stopped.
As great as Rubio’s power is, he starts slow and is vulnerable to being hurt of knocked out in the first couple of rounds. In September 2004, Rubio was knocked out in the 1st round by Kofi Jantuah. And against Kassim Ouma and Zaurbek Baysangurov in 2006, Rubio was made to look average against them in losing a pair of 12 round decisions.
Rubio had Baysangurov down in the 1st round, but then fell behind and ended up losing by a significant margin on the scorecards. However, neither of those fighters went to war with Rubio, instead focusing on boxing him and staying on the outside to prevent getting hit with one of Rubio’s big shots. Pavlik won’t likely be doing this, as he prefers to stand and slug it out with his opponents instead of using movement.
This was Pavlik’s reason for losing to Hopkins last year, because instead of choosing to box Hopkins, Pavlik focused entirely on trying to slug and ended up chasing Hopkins around all night long and taking a lot of punishment from the faster Hopkins.
Rubio will probably be there for Pavlik to bring his big punches and what the fight will boil down to is which fighter will get the better of the other first. Pavlik may be the bigger puncher of the two, but only by a small margin. But at the same time, Rubio is the better mover and the much versatile fighter of the two, and even though he doesn’t quite hit as hard as Pavlik, he hits’ close enough to give Pavlik all kinds of trouble.
With the power that Rubio has, and with the punishment that Pavlik has absorbed in fights against Fulgencio Zuniga, Bronco McKart, Jose Luis Zertuche, Edison Miranda, Jermain Taylor and Hopkins, Pavlik may be ripe to be knocked out at this point in his career.
He was staggered by McKart, hurt by both Taylor, Miranda and Hopkins, yet his good chin saved the day for him. Against Rubio, Pavlik will once again be facing a big puncher and his chin will be tested thoroughly by Rubio early on.
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