By Dave Lahr: Kelly Pavlik’s recent staph infection on the middle knuckle of his left hand is putting his October 3rd fight against Paul Williams in doubt. The fight will be delayed until December, and possibly not even then if the infection is still lingering by that point. This is all Pavlik needs is a missed opportunity like this. Already, Pavlik missed out on a fight against Sergio Mora because of the same staph infection.
That would have been an interesting fight, but nothing compared to the Williams fight. It’s difficult to imagine what Pavlik will do if the Williams fight disappears on him, because there are few worthy opponents in the middleweight division for Pavlik to fight at this point. IBF middleweight champion Arthur Abraham recently moved up in weight to the super middleweight division seeking bigger paydays against a larger number of quality fighters.
Pavlik, a rail thin 6’2” middleweight, likely doesn’t have the same options as Abraham because of his built and his limited boxing ability. Pavlik was exposed by 44-year-old Bernard Hopkins last year in a 12 round loss to Hopkins. Pavlik couldn’t deal with the movement or hand speed from Hopkins and ended up losing almost every round of the fight.
Against arguably quicker and better moving fighters like Andre Ward, Andre Dirrell, Lucian Bute and Mikkel Kessler, Pavlik’s chances would be slim. Therefore, Pavlik is going to need to make every effort he can to keep the Williams fight on track for December. It’s unknown right now whether Williams’ promoter will be willing to keep Williams out of action until then.
Williams hasn’t fought since beating Winky Wright by a one-sided 12 round decision in April and if Williams has to wait until December, that would be eight months between fights. Even then, it’s unknown whether Pavlik’s staph infection will have healed up sufficiently for him to fight. This problem has been lingering for months now and it appears to be a chronic issue. I don’t if that’s because Pavlik didn’t treat well enough the first time or if the bacteria are resistant to the drugs that are being used on it.
Since beating Jermain Taylor for the second time in February 2008, WBC/WBO middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik’s career has been steadily going downhill. Pavlik then followed that victory with a fight against Gary Lockett, who only few boxing fans had ever heard of in June 2008. Pavlik beat the little known fighter easily, but got no credit for having done so.
The fight against Hopkins was a disaster even before the first punch was thrown. Pavlik was in a no win situation in that fight due to Hopkins’ advanced age. If Pavlik won, people wouldn’t have given him credit because of the age factor and if Pavlik lost, his career would take a major hit for the same reason. As it turned out, it was even worse than people could imagine as Pavlik wasn’t even competitive in the fight and got more or less humiliated by Hopkins.
Pavlik then came back with a win over Marco Antonio Rubio in his comeback fight. After that fight, someone came up with the not so brilliant idea to fight Sergio Mora, a fighter with excellent boxing skills and someone known for making his opponents look bad. It was probably a stroke of luck that Pavlik suffered the hand infection at this time because Mora probably would have boxed circles around Pavlik and beaten him as easily as Hopkins did.
Beyond that, Pavlik missed out on an opportunity to fight Abraham and Felix Sturm, which was a real shame because Pavlik would have had a chance to unify the middleweight titles.
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