By Allan Fox: Former WBC/WBO middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik is still talking about his loss to Sergio Martinez in April 2010, a fight in which Pavlik took a beating in losing his two titles by the scores of 116-111, 115-112 and 115-111 to the stronger, faster and better boxer in Martinez. Pavlik is now saying he lost the fight because he came into training camp weighing 195 pounds of pure muscle and it took too much out of his body to take off all that muscle, according to an interview at examiner.com.

It’s an interesting theory but not one that passes the smell test because Pavlik looked just as poor in that fight as he had in his loss to then 43-year-old Bernard Hopkins two years earlier in 2008. What was Pavlik’s excuse then? He said he was too heavy from having put on too much weight. In looking at both fights, Pavlik seemed to have problems due to his poor footwork, his lack of punch variety, lack of hand speed and his tendency to throw nothing but power shots. He couldn’t handle the movement from either fighter and was dominated by them when it came to combination punching in close. Pavlik was throwing one punch at a time and getting beaten up in the process.

If you look at Pavlik’s best fights of his career against Jermain Taylor and Marco Antonio Rubio, you’ll notice that Pavlik fought the same way in those fights than he did in the Hopkins and Martinez losses. The difference was that he was going really good fighters in the Martinez and Hopkins fights, but facing weaker guys in the other fights.

It’s not a good sign that Pavlik hasn’t come to terms with why he really lost to Martinez. If he’s saying he got beat by Martinez due to being weight drained then it’s pretty obvious that Pavlik doesn’t see clearly the real reason he lost to him and that’s sad.