By Dan Ambrose: Former WBC/WBO middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik (36-2, 32 KO’s) has lost two out of his last four bouts against quality opposition. Pavlik, 28, will be facing 2nd tier fighter Brian Vera (17-5, 11 KO’s) on the undercard of the Manny Pacquiao vs. Antonio Margarito bout on November 13th at the Cowboys Stadium, in Arlington, Texas. Vera, 28, is an opponent especially picked out for Pavlik to win and look good in doing so. In other words, this is a mismatch and it’s supposed to be a mismatch.

Pavlik was beaten badly in his last fight against Sergio Martinez in a 12 round decision loss on April 17th. This was Pavlik’s second loss in the past two years. He suffered the first loss of his career against Bernard Hopkins in October 2008. Pavlik rebounded from the Hopkins loss top beat middleweight contenders Marco Antonio Rubio and Miguel Angle Espino in 2009. However, neither of those fighters are particularly good, despite inflated ranking. It gave the appearance that the plodding Pavlik had made improvements since his loss to Hopkins, but that simply wasn’t the case.

In his recent fight with Martinez, Pavlik was easily beaten as he ran out of gas in the last four rounds of the fight. Rather than move up in weight to the super middleweight division, which is what Pavlik should be doing because he’s melting off too much weight nowadays just to make the middleweight limit. However, Pavlik fails to see that he lost both of those fights because he lacked the skills. Pavlik says he was sick for the Hopkins bout and weight drained for the Martinez fight.

While I don’t doubt that Pavlik was both of those things to a certain extent, I still think he would have lost to both fighters because he appeared to have been beaten more because of his plodding style of fighting and his slow hand speed. He didn’t have the speed or the ability to cut off the ring in order to get the wins.

Now, supposedly Pavlik is injury free, his weight is close to the 164 pound catch weight limit for this fight, and he’s not sick. Pavlik should have no excuses should he get beaten once again. The question is will Pavlik retire if he gets beaten by Vera? I think Pavlik almost has to retires because if he can’t beat a fighter like Vera, a slow plodding middleweight without a lot of power, then Pavlik doesn’t belong at the top. Pavlik might as well retire in that case because if he can’t beat Vera, then he certainly doesn’t have the chance to beat a guy like Martinez or Paul Williams.