By Dave Lahr: I’m still trying to figure out what either Miguel Cotto and Kelly Pavlik accomplished this past weekend in beating the poor opposition that they were put in with. 10 years ago, names like Marco Antonio Rubio and Michael Jennings would have never been in the position to challenge for a title against quality fighters like Pavlik and Cotto, yet this weekend we had to suffer through both of these bouts which ended in one-sided knockouts.
Cotto ended up taking out Jennings in a 5th round TKO, a British fighter that was ranked at number #3 in the welterweight division despite having fought no one in the top 15, and Pavlik took apart Rubio in a 9th round TKO, who resembled more of a journeyman than what I consider to be a top five opponent. Instead of seeing Pavlik facing a quality fighter like Arthur Abraham, we had to settle for him defeating a badly over-matched opponent who failed to ever give him any resistance at all throughout the nine rounds of the fight. Heck, I’d settle for a bout against a top super middleweight rather than see Pavlik fight yet another poor opponent.
After the fight, instead of Pavlik’s name being mentioned for fights against Abraham, Winky Wright or Paul Williams, we were hearing fighters like Sturm, Duddy, Sergio Mora and Vernon Forrest being mentioned as possible future opponents for Pavlik. With that kind of fodder being fed to Pavlik, I don’t see how he can be beaten in the next decade.
Keep feeding him those kinds of fighters and one day he’ll have a record that will be the equivalent of Joe Calzaghe’s inflated record but with little substance to prove anything out of it. On top of that, Pavlik didn’t even look good against Rubio, fighting poorly as if he was waiting for the bottom to be dropped out on him by the weak punching Rubio.
For the life of me, I don’t know how Rubio was ever able to score all those 37 knockouts on his record of 43-5-1. They had to have been really bad fighters for him to knockout out that many guys because he looked like he looked as if he couldn’t punch his way out of a wet paper bag. Pavlik looked sloppy throughout the fight and missed with quite a few of his shots.
Cotto did a better job of beating his opponent, but then again Jennings was much worse than Rubio and looked totally out of his league against Cotto. It was like watching a deer caught in the head lights in the 1st round, as Jennings seemed to have no clue what to do with Cotto other than to run around the ring.
The win did little to prove anything about Cotto’s ability to withstand punishment or pressure, because Jennings gave him little of either, mostly running then entire fight. Overall, this fight was a complete waste of effort for either Cotto and Pavlik because it didn’t answer questions about their problems against big punchers, heavy pressure or fighters that can move around the ring.
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