By Jim Dower: WBC/WBO middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik is hoping to get his reputation back with boxing fans by beating light middleweight Sergio Martinez on Saturday night at the Boardwalk Hall, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Pavlik holds down two of the four belts, and is considered by some boxing experts to be the best fighter in the weak middleweight division. However, there’s more than a few people who no longer see the 28-year-old Pavlik as being the best fighter in the division and feel that he’s been steered around more dangerous opponents like Paul Williams to keep Pavlik a champion for as long as possible before gets beaten once again.

Pavlik was soundly defeated by Bernard Hopkins, then 44, in October 2008. In looking at that fight, Hopkins didn’t seem to do anything special in beating Pavlik other than using some lateral movement, an in and out attack and some occasional clinches to completely shut Pavlik down entirely. Martinez may be small for a middleweight at 5’11” and not as powerful as Pavlik, but he’s got the speed and foot movement that Hopkins had.

Martinez is considered to be the best fighter at light middleweight, and isn’t easy to hit. He seems to do really well against big punchers like Pavlik, who Martinez seems to be good at boxing circles around. Pavlik feels that his better power and size will enable him to crush and destroy the smaller Martinez like he’s done against his smaller challengers Marco Antonio Rubio, Gary Lockett and Miguel Espino.

Pavlik is a huge puncher and is devastating against fighters that stand in front of him and allow him to land his punches. Pavlik is much less good when he has to go after an opponent to try cut off the ring against them. Luckily for Pavlik, most of his opponents have just stood in front of him, dumbly fighting him at his own game and getting taken out before long. Martinez has very fast hands, and likes to get in close to land his shots and scamper away before he’s hit by them.

He fights a lot of the time with his hands down by his sides and likes to taunt his opponents. Martinez is somewhat like a slower version of Roy Jones Jr. and is very good at frustrating his opponents in the same way that Jones was able to do earlier in his career. Pavlik is going to try and offset what Martinez is doing by jabbing hard at him to keep him from getting in close. You can expect Pavlik to be doubling up on his jab.

Martinez could get around that by using movement to circle Pavlik and make him move his feet. Pavlik is poor at shifting his feet around to adapt to a moving target. If he’s improved in this area, he might be able to beat Martinez and regain some of his lost respect. But if Pavlik looks as slow as he did in his recent fight against Espino, then Pavlik will likely get dominated and end up losing badly to Martinez.