By Sean McDaniel: With IBF middleweight champion Arthur Abraham recently moving up to compete in the super middleweight division and take part in the six-man Showtime tourney, WBO/WBC middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik finds himself in a position where he no longer has any potential big named fighters for him to compete against on the horizon.

Indeed, it looks as if there really isn’t any one for Pavlik to fight unless he can somehow lure a fighter like Chad Dawson or Paul Williams into fighting him at a catch weight. After suffering an embarrassing 12 round defeat to 44-year-old Bernard Hopkins last year, I kind of doubt that Pavlik will be even slightly interested in fighting Dawson or Williams at a catch weight, though.

Without them, boxing fans might be forced into watching Pavlik’s promoter match him up with unappealing opponents like Sergio Mora in the near future. Although Mora was successful briefly as a light middleweight champion, watching him fight Pavlik is about as interesting as watching paint dry.

I can’t think of a whole lot of people who want to see that fight happen and I’m hoping that Arum won’t try and resurrect that fight in order to catch the Hispanic market on the west coast. There was hope (not a lot) that Pavlik would fight a unification bout against World Boxing Association middleweight champion Felix Sturm, but that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, because Sturm doesn’t want to leave Germany to come fight in the U.S.

I can’t blame Sturm, because he’s got it really easy over there, fighting the mostly soft opponents in the WBA and getting the benefit of the doubt by the judges for all the fights that go to decision, even when it appears that he’s lost by a landslide. The other options for Pavlik are as follows:

Sebastian Zbik
Dimitry Pirog
Gennady Golovkin
Daniel Geale
Roman Karmazin
John Duddy
Sebastian Sylvester
Hassan N’Dam N’Jikam

As you might have surmised, none of them are exactly household names aside from the recently beaten Duddy, and not the kind of opponents that the boxing public would really care to see.

Zbik (27-0, 10 KO‘s), a German fighter, is about as average as you can get. He has little power, zero hand speed and has been struggling against the soft opponents that his German handlers have been spoon feeding him. A fight against him wouldn’t draw flies. Pavlik would destroy him without too many problems. Zbik appeared to lose his fight last weekend against Italian Domenico Spada but ended up winning a very questionable decision in his native Germany.

Pirog (14-0, 11 KO‘s), a Russian fighter, has no power and is pretty much along the same lines as Mora and Zbik. Beating him won’t do anything for Pavlik’s career or erase the memory of him being humiliated by Hopkins. Pirog, 29, hasn’t faced anyone at this point in his career and shouldn’t even be ranked as high as he is in my view.

Geale, an Australian, was recently defeated by the aging Anthony Mundine, so a fight against Geale is pretty much out of the question. Besides, Pavlik would destroy this guy and get no credit for having done so.

Karmazin (39-3-1, 25 KO’s) was defeated only last year in a 10th round stoppage by Alex Bunema and is still in the rebuilding stage. He’s faced limited opposition since then.