By Thomas Gerbasi
“It was my fault.”
Despite all the calls for former middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik to dump his team after his April loss to Sergio Martinez, to revamp everything that seemed to be working just fine for his first 34 pro fights, “The Ghost” didn’t make anybody disappear when his record fell to 36-2. He turned the finger on the man in the mirror.
“We got to this point, won the world title, beat (Jermain) Taylor twice, defended it for three years, and there were other things to worry about in that fight, and it wasn’t so much the camp or anybody doing anything wrong,” said Pavlik. “I came into camp heavy at 195 and it was hard to lose that weight. That’s what really made a big difference in that fight.”
When he talks about his 12 round decision loss, one punctuated by a strong attack in the middle rounds that was bookended by early and late surges by Martinez, there are no sour grapes, no what ifs, just a matter of fact acceptance that he lost and that it didn’t help that his training camp was focused more on losing weight than gaining the knowledge to beat the Argentinean. And once he got on site in Atlantic City, things didn’t get any better, as he made the exhausting last ditch effort to make the 160 pound limit.
“A couple days before the fight is when you’re really supposed to start slowing up, letting your body heal and your legs rest, and we’re doing eight miles a day with a sauna suit and I’m sitting in a sauna and starving myself. These are the things you can’t do going into a fight,” said Pavlik, who weighed in at 159.5 pounds.
The Youngstown, Ohio native’s struggles with the scale have been well documented over the last few years, and he could get away with being less than one hundred percent physically against the likes of Gary Lockett, Marco Antonio Rubio, and Miguel Angel Espino. Against a world-class competitor like Martinez, he couldn’t, and he found out the hard way.
“In the middle rounds I was frustrating Martinez and then I just hit a wall in the eighth round, and the cut didn’t help,” he said. “But we got through it, and the main thing now is that I bounce back.”
That’s what fighters do, and Pavlik most certainly fits that job description. Always a no nonsense sort, the 28-year old isn’t one for over analyzing the past. If you win, you go back to the gym and get ready for a bigger fight. If you lose, you dust yourself off and get back at it until you win again. And winning again is the plan right now, as he works with longtime trainer Jack Lowe in California, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, for his November 13th bout against Brian Vera. He says the change of scenery isn’t necessarily to get away from distractions at home, but to surround himself with, as he puts it, “straight boxing.”
But first, there was the business of getting his life back.
The main character in a classic ‘local boy done good’ story, Pavlik took a slow and steady ride up the middleweight ranks, all the while repping Youngstown much in the way former lightweight champion Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini did in the 80’s. By 2007, wins over Jose Luis Zertuche and Edison Miranda put him in line for a title shot, which he made the most of when he rose from the deck to stop Jermain Taylor in seven rounds in September of that year. Two more wins in defense of the title followed before he was undressed over 12 rounds by crafty wizard Bernard Hopkins in October of 2008.
With the Hopkins bout being held at light heavyweight, Pavlik kept his belts and defended them against Rubio and Espino, yet those fights sandwiched a bout with a staph infection and an on-again off-again dance with Paul Williams that saw fans begin to hurl barbs at “The Ghost”. Again, Pavlik dusted himself off, took whatever heat he had to, and got back into the ring. He would halt Espino in five rounds, but against Martinez, he wasn’t able to pull off the win. And the critics began firing off again.
“Unfortunately, that’s the way it goes in all sports,” he said. “A guy can get hurt in football during the week, not be a hundred percent, and then he has a bad game and people are going to judge him on that performance. And that’s the same thing with me. They see me that night and then they comment on it.”
When the comments go from good to bad, it can get to you. So can all the attention, all the media obligations, and all the other things that have nothing to do with the fight. Add in the fact that he had been fighting almost non-stop as a pro for nearly a decade, and he needed a break.
“Everything was very demanding, and I didn’t have a lot of ‘me’ time,” he admits. “I was getting a little burned out, but that break really helped me out and made me actually want to get back in the gym and train hard all day long. I got the hunger back.”
As proof, Pavlik stepped on the scale for reporter Joe Scalzo on the Youngstown Vindicator on September 15th and clocked in at 174.8 pounds, just 11 pounds north of what he’ll need to make for his catchweight (164 pounds) bout against Vera, the third name bandied about for Pavlik’s return to the ring (the other two being Daniel Edouard and Giovanni Lorenzo). And though Vera’s current streak of losing four of his last five fights won’t strike fear in anyone’s heart, Pavlik isn’t looking past him. In fact, some of Vera’s pre-fight verbal jabs have lit a fire under the Ohio native.
“It just makes me more confident,” said Pavlik. “Let him talk. He’s obviously trying to get into my head, or he’s worried, but it hasn’t bothered me at all. I’ve seen some of the stuff that he’s been saying, and that’s fine with me – it’s a confidence builder.”
And it’s not as if Pavlik needed any extra motivation to put on a stellar performance in front of the type of audience a Manny Pacquiao pay-per-view card provides. But if a little trash talk helps, it’s key to point out that the only fighter who really went above the call of duty in trashing Pavlik before a fight was the always entertaining Miranda.
Pavlik chuckles.
“As of right now, Miranda’s the only one, and Vera’s starting to do it now, and we saw what happened with Miranda.”
If he sounds confident, he is, and he should be. Vera – an alumnus from ‘The Contender’ – has been knocked out in two of his five losses (against James Kirkland and Jaidon Codrington) and his other three defeats haven’t exactly been to household names (Craig McEwan, Isaac Rodrigues, and Maksym Bursak). Plus, his stationary style doesn’t exactly smell trouble for ‘The Ghost’. But if Top Rank knows one thing, it’s how to develop a fighter, even a fighter who has tasted success at the highest levels of the game. So there must be a method to the madness. As for Pavlik, he’s determined not just to win, but to show that he learned some lessons from the losses to Hopkins and Martinez.
“You can do that from any fight, even victories,” he said. “You never stop learning. I looked back and watched the Martinez fight and I saw some things that I could have done a little bit different in the early rounds. Sometimes I was leaving myself out there a little too much and things like that can actually make a big difference.”
And if he didn’t sew up the holes in his game, Vera might not expose them, but the next fighter Pavlik faces may, so it’s not about being lazy in the gym; it’s about working, getting better, and proving to the world that the kid everyone raved about in 2007 is still alive and well in 2010 and ready to take over once again. That’s what fighters do.
“I want to get the world title belts back, either at middleweight or super middleweight, and I want to reign,” said Pavlik. “I still want to fight. When the time comes that I don’t, I’ll sit down with my family and go over everything with them and call it quits, but as of right now, I’m 28 and I still have plenty of time.”
