By Allan Fox: Unbeaten International Boxing Federation (IBF) light heavyweight champion Tavoris Cloud (24-0, 19 KO’s) has signed a contract to fight former WBC light heavyweight champion Jean Pascal (26-2-1, 16 KO’s) in a fight later on in 2012 on Showtime. The venue and the date still has yet to be determined. Pascal, 29, has yet to sign his part of the contract, and hopefully he does end up signing to make the fight happen.

According to RingTV, Pascal, 29, was offered over $1 million to take the fight, which if true is a really big payday for a challenger in a light heavyweight division fight. This isn’t the glamor division, and Cloud still doesn’t have a huge fan base, although his fights are televised on Showtime.

Pascal hasn’t fought for the past 11 months since losing his WBC light heavyweight title to 47-year-old Bernard Hopkins in their rematch last May. Pascal was out-boxed by the aging Hopkins and looked poor in the second half of the fight. In their first fight in December 2010, Pascal and Hopkins fought to a highly controversial 12 round draw in a fight where many boxing fans thought Hopkins won.

Cloud, 30, is coming off of a controversial 12 round split decision win over Gabriel Campillo last February. The decision wasn’t a popular won, as a lot of boxing writers thought Campillo had done enough to deserve the decision. But ignoring the outcome of the fight, you can’t argue the fact that Cloud looked like a poor champion in that fight and basically was fought to a standstill by Campillo. Cloud wants to show that his wasn’t the real him when/if he faces Pascal. However, it’s pretty clear that Cloud can be out-boxed by fighters that stick and move. He’s also highly susceptible to taking shots, as his defense is really his offense. Each time Campillo would flurry on Cloud, he’d catch over and over again. Cloud had a bad habit of stopping his punching when he was getting hit and it looked bad. Campillo was able to light Cloud up with uppercuts all night long until the later part of the fight when Campillo seemed to stop punching for some reason.

Pascal is hoping to fight the winner of the April 28th fight between Hopkins and Chad Dawson. That’s the only thing that might in theory prevent Pascal from signing the contract to fight Cloud. If Pascal loses to Cloud, then he can forget about what might be the bigger payday against the Hopkins-Dawson winner. Pascal has already beaten Dawson, who figures to be the one that will come out on top in the Hopkins fight. Pascal might be better off waiting on the Hopkins/Dawson fight to get a likely chance against Dawson, who he matches up better against, then he would if he faces the nonstop punching machine Cloud.