Round by Round – Weekly Boxing Notes

There Are No Words↵
↵I have to start off this week’s boxing notes on a very solemn note. As you probably know by now, Oscar Diaz collapsed in the ring on Wednesday night while trying to answer the bell for the 11th round of his fight with Delvin Rodriguez. He had surgery yesterday to stop the bleeding in his brain and reduce the swelling. Presently he’s in a coma, although doctors remain optimistic that he will recover. Like everyone in the boxing community right now, my thoughts and prayers are with him and his family.↵

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Maybe You Can Go Home Again↵
↵By far the biggest non-tragic boxing news of the week was broken yesterday by Steve Kim over at MaxBoxing – the news that Kelly Pavlik is now scheduled to fight Bernard Hopkins October 18th on HBO PPV.↵↵Confounding all general presumptions about Pavlik’s plans for the fall, the fight will be contested at a catch-weight of 170 pounds. Everyone in boxing has known since the second Jermain Taylor fight that Kelly is eager to move up to 168 and vacate his middleweight title, but before he did that he wanted to unify the middleweight belts with a fight against Arthur Abraham at 160. In that Abraham decided to fight his IBF mandatory in the fall against Raul Marquez, the going theory was that Pavlik would bide his time with one more bout at the middleweight limit this fall. Sergio Mora, Marco Antonio Rubio, John Duddy, Winky Wright and Paul Williams all were considered to play the B-side in that equation, but none of them panned out. To be honest, except for the curiosity factor of Williams jumping up two weight classes, none were tremendously exciting propositions.↵

↵↵So in steps Bernard, a move I have to admit I’ve been waiting for since Pavlik first beat Taylor last September. It’s not a tremendously exciting proposition in and of itself – the sneaky way that Bernard now fights in his dotage leaves a lot to be desired on the action front to put it mildly. That said, there might have been a legitimate sub-current of drama to a Pavlik/Hopkins matchup that could be mined for great material in the media. Unfortunately even that is being flushed down the toilet because Bernard can’t make 160 pounds anymore. ↵

↵↵The only truly interesting narrative of a Pavlik/Hopkins fight is the storyline of the lineal middleweight championship, which Bernard held for many years before losing it (many thought unfairly) to Jermain Taylor, who subsequently lost it to Pavlik. If this were a fight at 160 with that title at stake, well, the stakes would be gigantic, and the historical implications immense. Imagine Bernard becoming the recognized middleweight champ again at his age by beating a monster like Pavlik. It would be, to my mind at least, a bigger achievement than Jack winning the ’86 Masters (ain’t nobody punching an old man when he plays golf).↵

↵↵At 170, however, the fight loses all of that intrigue and just becomes another weak PPV gimmick. If Pavlik wants to move up in weight, there are much bigger fish for him to fry than Bernard Hopkins. What does it mean to his career right now if he beats Bernard at 170? Next to nothing. Bernard is long, long past his best, very savvy and very difficult to hit but a sporadic worker with very little pop. Going up against a puncher like Kelly, you can guarantee that Hopkins will be at his most cautiously cagey in there, guaranteeing us fight fans a snooze of a fight in which the outcome is largely irrelevant anyway. ↵

↵↵And what’s even worse is that it now seems likely that Pavlik is done at 160. Word is that if he beats Hopkins, his next bout will be the Calzaghe fight that everyone has been clamoring for. I admit that I eagerly look forward to that fight and I’m glad it’s happening, but it’s also a shame to me that we’re losing a great champion at one of the historic weight classes so quickly. I wish Kelly had plied his trade at 160 a little longer and put his name in the middleweight pantheon alongside Ray Robinson and Carlos Monzon and Marvin Hagler and, yes, Bernard Hopkins.↵

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