Kelly Pavlik bows out of 13 November bout
Kelly “The Ghost” Pavlik (36-2, 32 KOs) has withdrawn from a high-profile match on the Manny Pacquiao-Antonio Margarito card due to an injury, boxingscene.com and others report.
"The Ghost" was set to take on Brian Vera 13 November, in a special HBO pay-pay-view event in front of 70,000 fans. The bout marked his return to the ring since suffering a loss in April to Sergio Martinez
that cost him his middleweight titles.
Pavlik reportedly suffered a rib injury in training that necessitated the withdrawal. Evidently it was serious enough for him to contact the involved parties and shy away from a bout that boasted an incredible
marketing potential, as well as an opportunity for Pavlik to reassert his prominence as a fighter.
The fight was set at a catchweight of 164lb, in part due to concerns about Pavlik being able to make the usual 160lb middleweight limit.
There's some speculation the rib injury could be masking another problem. ESPN.com asked Pavlik's trainer whether it might have anything to do with Pavlik's struggles with alcohol, but the trainer, Jack
Loew, didn't explicitly deny it.
"I have not seen Kelly do anything wrong... In camp, I was with him 24 hours a day. Now that we are back, I'm not," he said.
Pavlik said previously that much of the difficulty with Martinez was that he was forced to drain himself to make weight for the fight, thus affecting his performance in the ring.
A 2008 bout with legendary Bernard Hopkins saw Pavlik fight at a contracted weight of 170 pounds, ten pounds heavier than the middleweight contest with Martinez.
Talk amongst boxing insiders was that if Pavlik were to beat Vera, he would move on to work out details for a bout with IBF super middleweight champion Lucian Bute. Pavlik’s promotional company, Top Rank,
confirmed: “They [Bute promoter InterBox] want to see if we can put a Pavlik fight with Bute together for next year. But Pavlik still has to decide if he wants to stay at 160 or go to 168.”
Pavlik developed a legion of fans after he took out contender Edison Miranda and then got the better of Jermain Taylor in two successive bouts that proved highly entertaining.
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