Pavlik pulls out of Saturday’s fight against Cunningham – Breaking News!

By Boxing News - 08/02/2011 - Comments

Image: Pavlik pulls out of Saturday's fight against Cunningham - Breaking News!By Dan Ambrose: Former WBC/WBO middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik (37-2, 32 KO’s) has reportedly pulled out of Saturday’s fight against Darryl Cunningham, according to boxing news from Dan Rafael. The fight was supposed to be taking place in Pavlik’s home city of Youngstown, Ohio and was scheduled for 10 rounds and was going to be shown on Showtime in the United States. As if yet, there’s no explanation as to why Pavlik pulled out of the fight. We’ll have more updates on this later.

Pavlik, 29, has fought only once since losing his WBC and WBO titles in a one-sided loss to Sergio Martinez last year in April. In a comeback fight last May, Pavlik looked horrible in barely beating little known fringe contender Alfonso Lopez in a 10 round majority decision. The fact that Pavlik couldn’t even conclusively beat a bottom ranked super middleweight fringe contender has more than a few boxing writers wondering about his future at this new weight class. The 6’2″ Pavlik had a big advantage at middleweight because of his height and reach, but at super middleweight Pavlik is just another fighter. The division is loaded with fighters his size. He no longer has much of any advantage now that he’s moved up in weight.

The idea of fighting the 2nd tier Cunningham was to get an easy win over a southpaw fighter to get Pavlik ready for a big money fight against IBF super middleweight champion Lucian Bute in November. That fight has cash out written all over it, and it’s hard to see Pavlik having any chance whatsoever against a top super middleweight like that, especially in light of how poor Pavlik looked against a bottom 15 fighter Lopez.



Comments are closed.