By Chris Williams: Former International Boxing Federation welterweight champion Joshua Clottey (35-3, 20 KO’s) could be facing Carlos Quintana or Kendall Holt on the undercard of the Kelly Pavlik vs. Paul Williams bout on December 5th, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Neither of those names are all that exciting for me, given that Clottey was on the verge of fighting Shane Mosley but that fell through.

Clottey reportedly turned down a fight with WBC light middleweight champion Sergio Martinez, which would have been a great fight. Quintana, 32, was stopped in the 1st round last year by Paul Williams. Since then, Quintana has fought only once, beating an obscure fighter by the name of Joshua Onyango. I could care less about seeing Clottey fight Quintana.

A fight against Holt would be good. Holt looked decent in a losing effort against Timothy Bradley in April, although I wonder why Clottey wants to fight a light welterweight and not someone his own size? If he’s turning down a fight against a fighter bigger than him in Martinez, why then is he considering fighting a guy smaller than him in Holt? I realize Clottey is coming off a 12 round decision loss to Miguel Cotto in June.

But Clottey needs to keep the ball rolling by fighting good fighters his own size or bigger, and not cherry picking fighters from the lower divisions. I can’t stomach seeing fighters combing the lower divisions for beatable opponents. That kind of practice is off putting for me and I can’t respect a fighter that does that, even if they have talent.

It’s too bad the Mosley-Clottey fight didn’t go through, because Clottey sure could have used that fight to make a name for himself. He’s only had a small handful of fights against big named opponents, and he’s lost two of them to Antonio Margarito and Cotto. Clottey needs to prove that he can beat a top level guy at this point, and not just the other fodder that he’s been served up.

At 32, Clottey needs to speed up his career some because he’ll be 33 in March, and he doesn’t have a whole lot of time to make a mark. He had a great chance to beat Cotto in his last fight, but Clottey went into shut down in the later rounds of the fight, throwing few punches and letting the bout slip away.

If he had just fought hard and continued to throw punches, Clottey could have beaten Cotto, but he seemed to get lazy in the last four rounds. This is kind of the same thing that happened in his loss to Margarito. Clottey supposedly hurt his hand in that fight, but he looked tired by the 6th round and that’s when Margarito took over the fight.

Clottey needs to work on his stamina in a serious way and then try to step it up and get another title shot by facing the best fighters available. It might be a good thing that Clottey didn’t fight Martinez, because I think Clottey would have lost that fight. Martinez does well against big punchers like Clottey and he would have probably outclassed him.