{"id":1964,"date":"2010-04-07T00:01:43","date_gmt":"2010-04-07T04:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ringsidereport.com\/?p=1964"},"modified":"2010-04-07T00:01:43","modified_gmt":"2010-04-07T04:01:43","slug":"kelly-pavlik-more-wolf-than-ghost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/?p=1964","title":{"rendered":"Kelly Pavlik: More Wolf than Ghost"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>By Daniel \u201cTex\u201d Cohen<\/strong><\/p>\n

Apologies to the pugilistic public.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The masses have had too many styles and measurements coming at them recently to make sense of the whole big mess.\u00a0 Between Floyd Mayweather\u2019s boxing ability, Manny \u201cPacman\u201d Pacquiao\u2019s explosiveness, Paul Williams\u2019 supernatural frame and talents, Bernard Hopkins\u2019 agelessness, Edwin Valero\u2019s artillery, the two-headed Klitschkos\u2019 dominance, Juan Manuel Marquez\u2019s counterpunching wiliness, Chad Dawson\u2019s youth, Miguel Cotto\u2019s will and Shane Mosley\u2019s whirlwind attacks, there\u2019s no room to include some of the finer specimens of the Boxing universe.\u00a0 Not enough fights for not enough dollars in not enough venues.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some cats will chalk that up to business, and let me tell you; they\u2019re right.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Obviously, the world is littered in fights that fall apart from promotional psychobabble.\u00a0 Drama for nada.\u00a0 Boxing politics is the hurricane that runs over the villages of boxers that sacrifice for the sport.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yet consider the magnitude of it all.\u00a0 Surely, prospects take time to develop and must undergo tests before ascending to levels of greatness.\u00a0 Even the most dominant twenty-five-year-olds of the day are far from the legendary halls they deserve to join.\u00a0 Chad Dawson has plenty of belts and plenty of time, but he\u2019s not yet in the halls of history, and he knows it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then again, Dawson\u2019 undefeated record takes him far.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Large cross-sections of fans have pointed the finger at Floyd Mayweather to decry his claims of an undefeated record as \u201cfake.\u201d\u00a0 Some of those same fans seem to have gone fickle on Kelly Pavlik.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You wonder sometimes if \u201cThe Ghost\u201d, 36-1, 32 KO\u2019s, is snake bit.\u00a0 The visual tale is necessary for the casual fan to even understand why that \u201c1\u201d in the loss column is so significant.\u00a0 Pavlik is a professional that knows how to take his job the right way:\u00a0 Professionally.\u00a0 Rumors may swirl of his personal problems, but my memories so far of Pavlik can be summed up in two, proper words, and one name: Edison Miranda.<\/p>\n

Miranda was supposed to be the panther\u2026.the sleep walker\u2026the tough street Colombian with success on his mind.\u00a0 Miranda learned to read from a drug-dealer and slept in mosquito-infested gyms.\u00a0 He was kicked out of his house from his family twice at two different times.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pavlik was the prospect.\u00a0 It was his job to either struggle a bit before closing the show, or have trouble \u201clooking good\u201d in the ring.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t do \u201chis job.\u201d\u00a0 Rather, he slammed a courageous, but utterly overmatched, Miranda with shotgun blasts.\u00a0 Miranda was the man with the knife in the gun fight.\u00a0 Pavlik became the star and earned a shot at Jermain Taylor.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Given the current state of affairs, many forget how good Jermain Taylor has been in the past.\u00a0 Style has done Taylor dirty, as Pavlik was able to survive trouble early against Taylor and take him out late in the fight.\u00a0<\/p>\n

From there, Taylor was never again the same.\u00a0 Carl Froch caught the Arkansas native late in their championship bout, and Arthur Abraham gave us super six fireworks in taking out Taylor just as late.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It all started with Pavlik, though.\u00a0 \u201cThe Ghost\u201d put his butt on the line and fought his way out of defeat in two great fights.\u00a0 By that time, he had earned a tune up against the unknown Gary Lockett, and he delivered in that fight with dominance.<\/p>\n

So along came the scrap with Bernard Hopkins.\u00a0 Pavlik turns into a 4-1 favorite overnight and Hopkins relishes in the underdog role, counterpunching from angles galore and proving that he is as strong and youthful as ever in beating the skinnier Youngstown redwood like a side of meat under the fits of fictionalized character envisioned by Sylvester Stallone himself.\u00a0<\/p>\n

From that specific fight and a few delays of other bouts, Pavlik fell from grace.\u00a0 Apparently one loss, even to the great Bernard Hopkins, can obliterate an entire body of work.\u00a0 Even when a man faces all comers and has a loss to show for it, he is chastised.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ladies and gentlemen, we\u2019ve been Mayweathered.\u00a0 One loss never made a fighter minor league in the past.\u00a0 It shouldn\u2019t now.\u00a0 A fighter should be judged based on who he fights and how he performs in those fights.\u00a0 Kelly Pavlik passes both tests with flying colors.\u00a0 Most recently, he has a few rebuilding fights under his belt (both of which ended in knockouts) and he will face the vicious Sergio Martinez in a fight of might vs. speed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We all know \u201cspeed kills\u201d, but writing off Pavlik on a clich\u00e9 is rather absurd.\u00a0 \u201cThe Ghost\u201d is nowhere to be seen on the radar.\u00a0 For the amount of upside potential he has, Pavlik might be a good long-term bet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Do you see everyone in the super six dogging Kelly Pavlik?\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a good question, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

In a sport of moments, some great fighters catch a leg up on others.\u00a0 Jermain Taylor splashed on the national Boxing scene with two unanimous decision wins over none other than Pavlik\u2019s toughest opponent, Bernard Hopkins.\u00a0 In this case of rock, paper, scissors, it\u2019s easy to see who won what and why.\u00a0 Hopkins could not find angles on the athletic Taylor, but he was able to hit a stationary Pavlik.\u00a0 Pavlik was able to catch Taylor at the end of his punches and overwhelm him with size.\u00a0 Hopkins was too big.\u00a0 Hopkins can be out-boxed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hopkins himself told Pavlik that he would one day be great and that he shouldn\u2019t let the loss destroy him.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kelly Pavlik has been missing from the scene for too long.\u00a0 Rather than beckon the jokes the come with calling yourself a seemingly imaginary spirit, he should think about a\u00a0 name change to something vicious and just as respectable as\u2026 well, an \u201cExecutioner.\u201d<\/p>\n

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By Daniel \u201cTex\u201d Cohen Apologies to the pugilistic public.\u00a0 The masses have had too many styles and measurements coming at them recently to make sense of the whole big mess.\u00a0 Between Floyd Mayweather\u2019s boxing ability, Manny \u201cPacman\u201d Pacquiao\u2019s explosiveness, Paul Williams\u2019 supernatural frame and talents, Bernard Hopkins\u2019 agelessness, Edwin Valero\u2019s artillery, the two-headed Klitschkos\u2019 dominance, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[105,152,426],"class_list":["post-1964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boxing-news","tag-boxing","tag-champion","tag-kelly-pavlik"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1964\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}