By Jason Kim: Top Rank has made it official today that their fighter former WBC/WBO middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik (37-2, 32 Ko’s) will be fighting 36-year-old Darryl Cunningham (23-2, 10 KO’s) next month on August 6th in a tune-up fight for Pavlik at the Covelli Center, in Youngstown, Ohio.

This is a fight for Pavlik to get a little bit more rust out before taking on International Boxing Federation (IBF) super middleweight champion Lucian Bute in November in a big fight for Pavlik.

Perhaps one of the reasons why an older 2nd tier fighter was chosen for Pavlik this fight was that Pavlik looked so bad in his last bout in May against little known fighter Alfonzo Lopez in a 10 round majority decision win. That fight has to make one worry about Pavlik, because despite talk that he had worked on his flaws and was going to be a better fighter, Pavlik looked about the same as he did in his fight before that, a 12 round decision loss to Sergio Martinez in April 2010.

If anything, Pavlik looked even worse than he had in the Martinez fight. As such, a tune-up fight against Cunningham makes sense for Pavlik. You can’t put him in with a top tier fighter because there’s too much of a risk that Pavlik will lose, and it’s unclear whether he’ll have the same impact at super middleweight that he did at middleweight.

Pavlik was always big for a middleweight and that gave him an advantage over the smaller fighters. However, at super middleweight, much of Pavlik’s advantages in size have gone away and he’s now about the same size as the other fighters. He won’t be able to run over opponents with his power like he used to and will have to find other ways to win.