Kelly Pavlik Logs In Worst Perfomance of His Career

Most of your points can be answered by the fact that martinez likes to move about the ring in case you missed that.

The hbo commentary team nailed it when they said martinez fights when he wants to and when pavlik didn't want to.

 

Unfortunalty Pavlik is a fighter shot of confidence and belief in his ability at the moment ... hes not a bad fighter but he looks 70% of the miranda and Taylor performances ... ive read alot of speculation he has mental issues and enjoys the booze as well ..

For me hes not progressing at all ... he needs a freddie roach type character to move his game on a notch or six! .. I hope he can come again but he needs to assess whats happened and almost do an Amir Khan and reinvent himself with a new training team and get out of Youngstown ! ... hes a legend there but part of me thinks hes believing all the hype too much ....

I wish him well as hes a top fighter to watch but if he doesnt change his enviroment and hangers on then he will just be the guy who got schooled by Hopkins !

 

Pavlik will lose a rematch, also 168 dont look good for him

 

Certain aspects no, but Martinez' movement explains not throwing as much as he's accustomed to. For whatever reason, movement also seems to prevent people from throwing body shots as well. Froch didn't really throw any against Dirrell. AA didn't really throw many at all against Dirrell. Those are just recent examples. As far as missed opportunities with the right hand, it could be something with his confidence prior to the fight or ir could be something happening to his confidence DURING the fight, he got caught a lot early with counters and was worried about not being able to get off in the corner. Also, he seems to need to reset his feet a lot.

Those are some of the things movement CAN affect out of your list.

Not sure about the rest. Regarding the uppercuts, I don't analyze Pavlik fights as much or thoroughly as you do, but most of the fights I've seen from Pavlik he throws the uppercut when his opponent is in trouble or against the ropes. Does he throw it often center-ring?

This wasn't his worst performance. The Hopkins fight clearly was, IMO.

 

this crazy ass poster thinks this one dimensional bum had a bad performance. you ever thought that he looked spectacular against a bunch of bull**** opposition and once he had a step up in opposition his basic & fundamental skill set was totally revealed ? Exposing him to be the true "Double up on the jab" bum that he really is?


It's not geometry. The dude is not that great. They matched him up against a bunch of come forward bums all his career and when he finally faced a real boxer he got exposed for what he truly is

 

A Ghost in the Machine

By Springs Toledo

Blue-collar hero Kelly Pavlik is the kind of man who prefers the hard way. He takes the stairs. Over the past few years he has trudged up the most perilous staircase in sports like a laborer burdened with blunt tools. He doesn’t complain; he sees what there is to do and he does it with an uncomplicated resolve common in places like Youngstown, Ohio.

Youngstown. Back in 1922, “Pavlik” was one of 276 Slovak surnames on mailboxes in the Lansingville section of the city. This descendant remains close to home despite the fame and fortune his fists brought over the past few years. He stays while others leave. In 1930 the steel industry was strong and the population peaked at 170,000. It has declined 67% since then. Thirty-three years ago its economy collapsed when too many businesses moved away seeking cheaper labor; and now the empty shells of furnaces and foundries dot the landscape. The problem was always the same: stubborn Youngstown stuck with what it knew despite the signs of the times. It failed to develop new growth industries to sustain employment and as a result almost 1 in 4 of its inhabitants is scrounging below the poverty line.

Youngstown didn’t diversify.

During training, Pavlik leaves his parents’ house to do early morning roadwork …a skeletal figure in a hoodie running past haunted old mills.

Pavlik didn’t diversify either. Nor did he need to. This laborer climbed out of the basement where so many nameless fighters toil in dim lights and defeated first a contender and then a champion. Hometown support helped. Those blunt instruments dangling at the end of his arms helped more.


The contender was Edison Miranda, a pure puncher. Miranda’s style contains a total of two elements, absorb and deliver. It is no more sophisticated than his hand-to-mouth childhood in a third-world country, but it was enough to see him bring a 28-1 record into a title eliminator against Pavlik. Pavlik absorbed and delivered better and stopped the Colombian in seven rounds. Miranda didn’t have an alternate script. He still doesn’t, despite a reported nine months of training under Joe Goosen. He took shots on Saturday night with the kind of bravado that falls as he fell after an unseen uppercut landed on a nerve center. As Lucian Bute skipped away, they needed a broom to sweep up the broken pieces of pride and promise. Miranda couldn’t diversify.

The champion was Jermain Taylor. Thousands of Pavlik’s neighbors left Youngstown for Atlantic City when he faced the then-undefeated middleweight king. It was a battle for the ages. Five rounds after teetering on the brink of a knockout loss, Pavlik hit Taylor with an assembly line of punches that dropped the champion like a crane would scrap metal.

That was 2007. The first white linear middleweight champion since 1980 threw that belt over his shoulder and thanked the city he loves. “I still get goose bumps,” he said during the post-fight press conference, “thinking about the fans who came out.”

The excitement a white working class American champion stirs up in the boxing world is something to behold. More complex in its origins than racism and less noble than patriotism, it was notarized when Pavlik handled Taylor again in the rematch. But purists of every pigment remained suspicious about the new king’s aptitude. Taylor’s style was never sophisticated. He never learned his craft well enough to become a technician or a stylist, and instead relied on natural ability. His legs moved as if he was playing tennis. He was not malicious and the nom de guerre of “Bad Intentions” didn’t make him so. Taylor was spirited but never mean, competitive but never do-or-die. Pavlik’s search and destroy robotics were out of his bounds.

Nothing was out of bounds for the master craftsman who stood atop the next flight in the perilous stairwell. With tools as sharp as Pavlik’s are blunt and far more efficient, Bernard Hopkins used a multi-faceted approach to deal with a straight-thinking, straight-punching method, and spun him as easily as a hustler spins a hick. Pavlik stumbled, an antique wheezing and creaking while Hopkins was born again.

Afterwards the master craftsman pushed his glove into the chest of the laborer, “You are a great middleweight champion,” he told Pavlik, “keep your head up and keep fighting.”

Pavlik did as he was told. He made two low-risk defenses and stopped both. But disillusionment had set in among the masses. The word was out, even in Youngstown. ‘Heavy-handed Pavlik is one-dimensional,’ it said, ‘he has trouble with skilled boxers.’

Argentinean Sergio Martinez is a skilled boxer. He is also a southpaw and an athlete superior to Taylor. Taylor ran track in high school. Martinez was a professional soccer player and cyclist, who started boxing at the ripe old age of twenty. He has evolved into a stylist who fights with a rhythm all his own, with legs that move on wheels and a soccer player’s sense of placement. Those wheels and that placement were more than enough to make the feared and avoided Paul Williams look like, well, Kelly Pavlik.

With that performance, Martinez identified himself as a bad choice for any fighter living in a single dimension.

…So what did our blue-collar hero do? His callused hand signed to fight Martinez. That wrench that Hopkins so casually tossed into his machine had to be removed and Pavlik would try to do it the hard way, by prevailing over someone who promised to be even more wrenching.

He failed.

By the end of the ninth round, the middleweight champion looked as if the Ohio state bird had crashed headlong into his face. “I couldn’t see,” he said minutes after the blood was wiped off his face, after the title was surrendered.

Youngstown had Black Monday; Pavlik, Bloody Saturday. A local historian might suggest to us that he made the same mistake that his city made decades ago. City and champion stuck with what they knew in an expanding market and ended up losing what they had.

Now twenty-eight years old, Pavlik has gone as far as he can go without making fundamental adjustments to his machinery. Le fantôme dans la machine insists that he realign his equipment to meet styles more sophisticated than simple punchers and over-eager athletes. The word is out. Geometry and mobility can break him down. If nothing changes, he himself will end up a scuffed stair for the newly ascending.

He must diversify.
…
Youngstown, like its favorite son, has been struggling in a ruthlessly progressive world that left it brooding by broken windows. This year newspapers are reporting that hope is rising for the city; new initiatives are developing technology-based companies with some success. Kelly “The Ghost” Pavlik wants to become a part of the renewal plan.

There is hope for him.

Boxing’s landscape, littered though it is with dented husks, has a history animated by willing spirits …and resurrections. 
 
 
 

http://www.thesweetscience.com/boxing-article/7945/ghost-machine/

 

You sir are correct. It doesn't matter who they put in front of you, you still have to execute. And really, the same goes for Pavlik, he may be one dimensional, but he was still able to execute his one dimension to quite a few victories.

 

Martinez just never let kelly get into his groove. Kelly had the weight advantage and could of easily had the fight go his way had he fought like the taller man and kept throwing punches from every angle he could think of. At one point kelly started blocking sergios punches in succession as if he had caught on to sergios rythim but martinez just proved to be too quick for pavliks style.

 

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