By Jim Dower: Going into this Saturday’s fight between WBC/WBO middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik (36-1, 32 KO’s) and Sergio Martinez (44-2-2, 24 KO’s) at the Boardwalk Hall, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, a lot of people are seeing Pavlik’s superior power as being the telling factor in this fight. Indeed, many of the boxing experts think that Pavlik’s huge power and size will be too much for the smaller, weaker 5’11” Martinez. I don’t know that I necessarily agree with them. Martinez showed in his last two fights against Kermit Cintron and Paul Williams that his power seems to be getting better with age, as he’s started to load up on his shots more.

In his fight with Cintron, Martinez showed excellent power, about as good Cintron’s when he was loading up and even knocked Cintron down. The referee, who was shielded from the left hand shot Martinez landed, ruled that Cintron’s knockdown was caused by a head butt. However, it was a clear left hand to the head and the missed call saved Cintron from being knocked out.

And in Martinez’s last fight against the tall 6’1” Williams, Martinez dropped him early with a big shot to the head. Williams got up but would continue to take huge punches periodically during the fight. Martinez didn’t stand and throw one big shot after another like Pavlik, but he was very effective and landing powerful pot shots to win rounds.

In this case, Martinez didn’t land enough of them to win the fight, but a lot of people felt that he should have been given the decision because of the cleaner punches that he landed over the course of the fight in comparison to Williams. Martinez’s power is an overlooked factor. Most people don’t think of Martinez as having power. When they think of him, they think immediately to his excellent movement, his in and out attacks and his superb defensive skills.

They don’t think of him as having excellent power. But he does and this could be a factor against Pavlik, because Kelly is going to be there to be hit because of his mediocre defensive skills and slow hand speed. In comparison to Martinez’s two opponents, Pavlik is much slower and wide open. Pavlik is more like the big punching, albeit slow, Alex Bunema, who Martinez stopped in the 8th round in October 2008.

Bunema had huge power in both hands and was a dangerous puncher who had recently knocked out Roman Karmazin and Walker Matthysse going into his fight with Martinez. However, Martinez’s hand speed, defensive and power were too much for the slow-footed, slow-handed Bunema, as he ended up getting totally dominated by Martinez until the fight was finally stopped in the 8th round.

I think we could be seeing a repeat of that fight this Saturday night with Martinez lighting the painfully slow Pavlik up with big power shots and making him look like a one-dimensional plodder in the fight. Pavlik does well against fighters that just stand there begging to be hit, but struggles against fighters that use any kind of movement. Martinez is a top rung fighter in terms of movement, and I think Pavlik is going to having problems with both his speed and power on April 17th.