America At Large: When Kelly Pavlik checked out of his Atlantic City hotel on the morning of September 30th, he was carrying the WBC and WBO middleweight championship belts he had won by knocking out Jermain Taylor the night before, writes George Kimball.
What he was not carrying was his purse. After the title fight, the New Jersey Board of Athletic Control had presented the Pavlik family with two cheques. One, for $666,750, represented Kelly's share of his million-dollar purse, less managers' and trainers' fees. The other, for $105,000, was made out to Mike Pavlik, who co-manages his son with Cameron Dunkin.
When the new champion and his dad returned to their room after a night of celebration, Pavlik pere had placed the two cheques on the dresser, right beside the coffee pot. The family car was well along the road back to Ohio the next morning when Mike suddenly sat bolt upright.
"I think," he gasped, "I just left the maid a really big tip." Like three-quarters of a million dollars.
Kelly says he was never as concerned about the misplaced money as his father was, since he knew that cheques that large might be difficult for someone else to cash.
The worst thing that could have happened would not have been if they'd fallen into the hands of an Atlantic City chambermaid, but an Atlantic City elected official. One-third of the membership of the City Council at the New Jersey seaside resort is at this moment either in jail or under indictment, and four of the last eight mayors have been convicted of or pleaded guilty to corruption charges.
And that figure doesn't include the present mayor, Bill Levy, who disappeared a few nights before the Pavlik-Taylor fight in the midst of yet another investigation. (Turns out Levy, who resurfaced on Tuesday, had checked himself into a substance-abuse clinic; the investigation into whether his worship defrauded the government by falsifying his military records remains ongoing.) As the Pavliks barrelled down the highway, the panic-stricken Mike Pavlik managed to reach Top Rank publicist Lee Samuels on his mobile phone. Samuels in turn contacted promoter Bob Arum, who immediately stopped payment on the cheques and agreed to issue replacements.
The money arrived in Youngstown a few days later. Kelly Pavlik celebrated his windfall by going on a profligate spending spree: he went out and bought four new tyres for his (old) car, suggesting that the youngster from Youngstown may turn out to be cast in the mould one of his more illustrious but notoriously frugal predecessors, Marvellous Marvin Hagler.
At a New York press conference three days before the Taylor-Pavlik fight Arum (presumably with an eye toward Emanuel Steward, who was present as Taylor's trainer) appeared to commit heresy by comparing Pavlik to Steward's most revered client.
"With all due respect to Tommy Hearns, Kelly Pavlik is the best puncher I've ever seen in the middleweight division," said Arum that day at BB King's nightclub. "And unlike Tommy, he has a chin to go with it." At the same gathering, Pavlik said that "the people who are picking Jermain Taylor because Kelly Pavlik is too slow are going to be surprised. I think my boxing ability isn't recognised by a lot of people."
As it turned out, neither assessment was inaccurate. Battered to the floor in the second round, Pavlik survived a near-knockout and bounced back to take Taylor out in the seventh.
Ironically, Taylor's first career loss came in the first fight in nearly two years that he didn't prepare for by boxing with Andy Lee.
With Taylor defending against a trio of consecutive left-handers (Winky Wright, Kassim Ouma, Corey Spinks), the Limerick middleweight became his stablemate's principal sparring partner. Before the Pavlik fight, Taylor publicist Norman Horton supposed that the steady run of left-handers might have been unprecedented among middleweight champions, but it wasn't. In 1979-80 Vito Antuofermo had back-to-back-to-back fights against southpaws Hagler and Alan Minter (twice). Another former middleweight champ, Roy Jones Jr, once faced seven left-handed opponents in eight fights, but that was as a light-heavyweight.
The unassuming Pavlik comes from a blue-collar background and is already being hailed as a breath of fresh air to the sport.
Meanwhile, Arum is figuring out how to best cash in on his new champion's sudden popularity, and one beneficiary could be Derryman John Duddy.
Pavlik's contract with Taylor included a rematch clause, but (at the insistence of the then-champion, who had hoped to go after Joe Calzaghe once he disposed of Pavlik), it specifies that the return bout would be contested at 166 lb, meaning that if it happens at all (Taylor does not at the moment seem eager), Pavlik-Taylor II would be a non-title fight.
The short list of title challengers already appears to have been pared down to two - Duddy and Contender (season I) winner Sergio Mora. Arum will be monitoring Duddy's performance against Noe Tulio Gonzalez Alcoba at the National Stadium on Saturday week.
A Pavlik-Mora fight would likely be staged somewhere in Ohio, a reward to the new champion's fans, thousands of whom travelled to Atlantic City for the Taylor fight.
Pavlik-Duddy, on the other hand, would take place in the mecca of boxing - Madison Square Garden - sometime this winter, and the viability of that bout may rest less in Duddy's hands than in those of his cut-man, George Mitchell. The Derryman not only needs to win impressively on October 20th, but must reverse a recent trend by emerging from his Dublin fight without significant residual damage.
