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Cotto and Pavlik Try to Pick Up the Pieces

Feb 19, 2009, 9:15 PM UTC

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â†µThis Saturday night, two of the biggest stars in boxing begin the next phases their careers after suffering devastating losses in 2008, the first loss on either man’s previously pristine record. â†µâ†µWelterweight Miguel Cotto and middleweight Kelly Pavlik, who still holds the WBC and WBO middleweight titles, will be fighting on the same card from different venues on Saturday in a pay-per-view event underwritten entirely by their promoter, Top Rank. Pavlik will fight in his hometown of Youngstown, Ohio for the first time since he became the middleweight champion, and Cotto will fight at Madison Square Garden in New York, where he has proven a huge draw in the past, notably in his pre-Puerto Rican Day parade fights with Paulie Malignaggi in 2006 and Zab Judah in 2007. â†µ

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â†µThe narrative of these fights is compelling for both men, although neither bout promises to be much of a contest. For Pavlik, it is his first trip to the ring since the shellacking he received at the hands of Bernard Hopkins in a 170-pound catch-weight fight last October. Pavlik’s opponent this Saturday will be Marco Antonio Rubio, a bittersweet bout for the champion that surely will prompt some thoughts of what might have been for him and his team. After Pavlik was unable to secure a bout with Joe Calzaghe last fall, he opted to move up in weight to take on Hopkins for more money rather than face Rubio, who was the mandatory WBC middleweight challenger. â†µ

â†µâ†µWe all know how that turned out. The Pavlik train, previously thought unstoppable, was derailed in a huge way. Now, with the shifting economy, and with Pavlik’s star having fallen a notch due to the Hopkins loss, HBO wasn’t even willing to air a Pavlik/Rubio bout (few expect Rubio to be able to go the distance with the much bigger Pavlik), so they’re forced to do it on this Top Rank in-house pay-per-view. How the mighty have fallen.â†µ

â†µâ†µCotto finds himself in a similar bout -- taking on a soft touch after a huge loss in a fight deemed so lopsided that HBO chose not to air it. Cotto will be taking on British champion Michael Jennings, a fighter about whom little is known here in the States. To be honest, not a tremendous amount seems to be known about him in England, which leads one to believe that he’ll be absorbing a jolly old beating from Cotto on Saturday night.â†µ

â†µâ†µIn Cotto’s case, however, a soft touch seems justified, given that this will be his first fight since his epic war with Antonio Margarito last July. That fight, of course, and the brutal beating that Cotto sustained in it, are now the subject of enormous controversy given the fact that Margarito and his trainer recently had their licenses revoked for a year after being caught in an attempt to load Margarito’s wraps prior to his fight with Shane Mosley in January. Many now suspect that Margarito’s wraps were loaded when he fought Cotto, a question that was even raised in the recent hearing into the Mosley situation by the California State Athletic Commission. â†µ

â†µâ†µThe truth of the matter may never be known, a sad fact that taints what was otherwise one of the great fights of the decade. For his part, Cotto seems not to be dwelling on the past, but rather focusing on proving this Saturday night that he’s fully healed from the physical destruction that Margarito visited upon him and more than ready to unleash some physical destruction of his own. On that score, I say … woe to Michael Jennings.â†µ

â†µâ†µAs for Pavlik’s opponent, Marco Antonio Rubio, I suspect that he also is in for a heap of trouble, heading into the Youngstown epicenter of Pavlik-mania to face a recently humiliated man looking to reclaim his knockout swagger. In other words, come Sunday morning it’s near certain that both Kelly Pavlik and Miguel Cotto will be back to their savage and winning ways.â†µ

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This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.

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