"It was just a roller-coaster ride, y’know? It started off good with the fight in Youngstown with the title defense; then after that, it was just a constant battle the whole summer and then, just when we feel we got it beat...the infection is gone...we end up having that real bad reaction to the antibiotics, which put me out even longer," Pavlik explained of his physical ailments. "So it slowed down the therapy and everything else we’re supposed to be having on the hand. It was just a long battle. It’s behind us now."
While his hand might finally be healthy, will his reputation ever recover? It seemed that there were daily whispers of his exploits throughout the year and accusations that there really was no injury to his hand. As the Timex Social Club once asked: How do rumors get started?
Pavlik admitted to Maxboxing, "Yeah, I paid attention to it but I don’t lose any sleep. The ones that make the rumors are -I’ll use this [term] and I hope it gets put in- a bunch of derelicts. That’s exactly what they are. People that don’t have nothing better to do than to start these rumors. I mean, I don’t think any doctors from the Cleveland Clinic -that is, a first-class hospital- I don’t think any high profile doctor is going to make up a lie and risk his whole entire career for me over a staph infection. Everything was medically proven with the staph infection and people just want to say what they want to say and make up what they want to make up."
Fans howled in disgust as Pavlik had to postpone his appointment with Paul Williams twice over the fall and then finally scheduled this upcoming bout.
"People talk about, ’Well, you’re fighting two weeks later after Williams, after the December 5th fight.’ Well, we asked the Williams camp to push the fight back a month, three weeks, well, they said no. They wanted the December 5th date. Well, then I’m sitting around at the house just thinking I’m probably fighting at the end of January, February, now," recalled Pavlik, on how this bout with Espino came together. "I get a phone call saying that we have to fight on the 19th or we get stripped of our titles. So that’s pretty much what it boiled down to but people are still going to say, ’Well, oh, well, you could fight two weeks sooner.’ But they don’t know the whole situation."
Pavlik believes his integrity and, worse yet, for a fighter, his courage, was attacked, "I do, like I said. With these derelicts that are saying this sh*t, I don’t care. I still sleep good at night and I know the truth. But some of the people in the camp get bothered by it. As far as my integrity, I know the truth. My wife, people inside the camp, my friends, the real fans know the truth. I don’t let it bother me. First of all, you gotta look at it like this: Paul Williams says he’s the most feared fighter -and this is the honest to God truth and you can pull up the records- it’s a proven fact when
I make this statement. We wanted to fight Paul Williams back last year in October. Paul Williams and them did not take the fight; did not want to deal with the fight. So we ended up fighting Bernard Hopkins two weight classes above my weight. Probably one of the most craftiest fighters, a ring legend, and I went two weight classes to fight him.
"Now, taking nothing away from Paul, who do you think is a more dangerous fight? Jumping up two weight classes to fight a guy who walks around at 190, who’s a legend or a kid that’s coming up from junior middleweight? So he didn’t take the fight and I ended up fighting Bernard Hopkins."
But what has upset fans, especially ones that made travel plans to watch the Pavlik-Williams clash and shelled out for tickets and hotel, was that Pavlik’s prognosis seemed to change on a daily basis, as did his fight schedule. Did Team Pavlik make a mistake in making sure the staph infection was completely healed before announcing any plans?
His manager, Cameron Dunkin states, "I don’t think so, because the doctor is the one who said it. We took him to the Cleveland Clinic, which is what they asked for and they wanted him to go to New York and see a specialist and we all agreed. It was all of our faults, we all agreed, there. But God heals people, not doctors. So he said he made a mistake and it didn’t heal as fast as he thought it would."
Throughout this time, more and more reports leaked out about the personal life of Pavlik. It seemed he had done every unethical thing short of committing homicide.
"I think after awhile you kinda see what people like Britney Spears and Tiger Woods and everybody goes through," said Mike Pavlik, the father of the middleweight champion." Then you start to realize its part of the game. What I’m trying to get at is, once you’re in the spotlight, you’re easy pickings and my heart goes out to those people that get picked on and it’s going to happen to everybody and anybody."
To them, some of the rumors were downright malicious, others ridiculous.
"Sometimes I almost found them comical," said the elder Pavlik, who had his own Mark Twain moment, "Especially when they reported my death. I had a hangover that morning, too." But he can laugh this one off, being that he is actually alive and well." I was close to it but I pulled through."
But he admits they may not have taken the staph infection seriously enough at the beginning.
"Not at first," he said from Youngstown, while his son spent much of this training camp in Las Vegas. "But like everything else, the longer it kept lingering, that’s when I would start thinking, ’Oh, my God, one week, two weeks, one month, two months.’ That’s when you start saying, ’Whoa, this is just not natural.’"
The hand is healing. It’s still not 100-percent but it’s good enough for Pavlik to resume his career. For the Chinese, 2009 has been the year of the Ox. For Pavlik, it’s the year of the staph infection.
His promoter Bob Arum stated, "It was a dangerous year. It was a terrible year. I mean, he almost died. All these boxing morons, that he’s ducking Paul Williams...and look at the records at the Cleveland Clinic. The guy was close to death. And that’s something for athletes to realize that when this staph infection occurs it is not going to be localized, it can spread throughout your body. Some of the Cleveland Brown guys (Kellen Winslow, Brian Russell, Braylon Edwards, Ben Taylor, LeCharles Bentley and Joe Jurevicius) almost died a couple of years ago."
If Pavlik gets past Espino as expected, Top Rank would like to make the Williams fight (again).
"Why not?" asked Arum, rhetorically. "If that junior middleweight kid could knock him down and almost knock him out, when Kelly hits him, he’s gone.
In the immediate aftermath of Williams’ victory over Sergio Martinez on December the 5th, his promoter Dan Goossen said that for that fight to be re-visited, the upfront money must be paid to Williams and that there must be a 50-50 split of all revenue streams. Arum’s reaction to all this?
"Dan Goossen is not a very bright guy. He never was, he never will [be]," said the veteran promoter; who you assume will not be sending out a Hanukkah card to his promotional colleague this holiday season. "It’s not even his [Goossen’s] fighter, Paul Williams. He [Arum] gets a fee from Al Heymon. So who cares what Dan Goossen says?"
Pavlik wants the fight. To him, it’s become personal.
"Yeah, it has," Pavlik admitted, "we signed the contract for the last fight. We signed the contract three weeks before [Williams] did because they were just fighting [about] that they wanted this and that. Then after we said, ’We’ll give him this,’ then they wanted that. I wanted the fight so bad; I signed the contract three weeks before he did."
But that will have to happen next year; which couldn’t come soon enough for Pavlik and his family.
"People just can’t digest what we’ve been through this year," said his father, last week. "We’ve had the lingering staph infection; we had the allergic reaction that almost took his life. Then we had, of course, after the staph infection was cleared up, the allergic reaction, we had to battle getting the tendons and that knuckle to move like it once did."
"So it’s been a bad year."
DALLAS
Like J.R. Ewing, Jerry Jones and his offer to host Pacquiao-Mayweather at his new billion-dollar Cowboy Stadium might have been shot down but it’s not out, by any means. Jones has now upped the ante to around $25 million. Yeah, it’s true; they do everything bigger in Texas.
After the fights this weekends at Agua Caliente Casino in Rancho Mirage, California, Bob Arum was speaking to reporters about where this fight will end up. It’s clear that judging by his tone and tenor, he wants the best deal out there. And unlike Golden Boy Promotions and Richard Schaefer, he isn’t beholden to MGM-Mirage to bring this event to the MGM Grand in exchange for hosting future events.
He didn’t outright say it, but you got the sense that at the very least, he is very, very intrigued by what Jones has to offer.
Sources tell me that Floyd Mayweather, who wasn’t thrilled that Schaefer ditched the scheduled meeting with Jones last Wednesday, actually met up with officials from Land Shark Stadium, himself, about the possibility of staging this fight in that venue and is very interested in holding this fight at a big venue. But bottom line, "Money" is a business man. He wants the most lucrative deal for him out there. And the one thing that Arum kept harping on, as he was surrounded by media members this past weekend, was that both he and Schaefer had a fiduciary responsibility to their clients to seek out the best deal for them as individuals; not their companies.
THE DESERT STORM
I’ll say it right now; Timothy Bradley is the best junior welterweight in the world, bar none. His run the past year-and-a-half (which includes a road win over Junior Witter for the WBC title, unifying his belt against Kendall Holt and, most recently, a resounding win over the talented Lamont Peterson) is among the most impressive the sport has seen, recently.
He opened a lot of eyes by out-boxing a smooth boxer and using deft lateral movement to trouble Peterson. He boxed but he also did a lot of fighting in-between. He has not only become an entertaining performer, now he’s getting pound-for-pound buzz. His promoter, Gary Shaw, would love to face Amir Khan (even overseas) but if they can’t get that done immediately, there are plenty of other names out there I’d love to see him face: Marcos Maidana, Devon Alexander, Paulie Malignaggi, Ricky Hatton and Victor Ortiz.
As for Peterson, he lost but I think he comes out of this fight a better fighter than he was coming into it. After the third round knockdown, he could’ve packed it in. But he fought gamely. And while he lost a large majority of rounds, he made Bradley work hard for them. Bradley, one of the sport’s most well-conditioned athletes, admitted that this was the hardest he had ever worked to secure a victory. I think his time to win a major world title is coming sooner rather than later. This is a talented -and we found this out on Saturday night on Showtime- tough, young fighter.
But right now, it’s Bradley’s time.
THE U
If you loved the Miami Hurricanes of the 80s, you probably loved them even more after watching "The U" on ESPN this past weekend. If you despised them, you most likely were sickened by what you saw and detest them that much more. But either way, you couldn’t help but watch the latest installment of "30 for 30."
That program really was one-of-a-kind. It’s an era that will never be duplicated (to the relief of some). But watching that on late Saturday night (after I had raced home from Rancho Mirage in rainy, wet conditions) brought back some great memories. I almost made the decision to don my old Hurricane "Starter" jacket (made famous by 2 Live Crew) while watching this presentation. And yes, I still have mine, somewhere in my closet.
They showed a lot of the old classic Cane celebrations, from Bernard Clark’s "Running Man" dance to Randall Hill’s "George Jefferson" shimmy and the other celebrations that were capped off by pelvic thrusts. But they left out perhaps my favorite UM celebration routine -the Bunny Hop; which is exactly what it was. I vividly recall, in 1988, safety Charles Pharms intercepting a pass in the end zone from LSU’s Tommy Hodson in "Death Valley" in Baton Rouge, and then all the Miami defenders gathering in a circle and then simultaneously doing the Bunny Hop before exiting toward their sidelines.
I loved any celebration that I could do. All those fancy hip-hop moves were too complicated for me.
FINAL FLURRIES
I have to say, the food at Waters Cafe at Agua Caliente, is really good. And no, not like Rafael’s. C’mon, let’s not be silly. But it’s very good...Danny Green, who is being rep’d here in the United States by the Shaw-riff, has a handshake that is like a vice-grip...Is it just me, or was Vic Darchinyan headed for a long, difficult night before he landed his bomb on Tomas Rojas? I see Darchinyan-Donaire II playing out the same way as the original...Told that an Alfredo Angulo/Chris Arreola doubleheader on HBO (which would be co-promoted by GSP and Goossen-Tutor) is being seriously discussed for next spring. This card would take place in Los Angeles/SoCal....Was it just me, but was watching the HBO triple-header was a chore? Especially the heavyweight fight, just what was Kevin Johnson trying to accomplish out there?...For this week’s edition of "The Main Event," we have tentatively lined up Calvin Watkins to discuss the Dallas offer to host Pacquiao-Mayweather. Our old buddy, Cal, has really been on top of things over there...I guess the "D" in Dallas Cowboys must not stand for "December"...Questions or comments can be sent to k9kim@yahoo.com....Twitter.com/stevemaxboxing
