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.
Pavlik has fought Gary Lockett, Hopkins and Marco Antonio Rubio since winning the WBO/WBC middleweight titles in a 7th round stoppage over Jermain Taylor in 2007. I have no idea why Pavlik keeps fighting lesser opponents, because he seemed like someone that was going to be a different type of champion compared to some of the European middleweights champs that only seem concerned with milking their title belts for as long as possible.
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.
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