OnThEGRiND BoXiNG

Tuesday July 21st, 2009
by Jesse Rican - OnThEGRiND BoXiNG New York

This past Sunday we had on of our best interviews at OnThEGRINDBoXiNG.coM with Harold Lederman, and we also had a great conversation for the first hour of the show. I would like to focus on one of the discussions, which was about Sergio Mora, and whether he deserves to get a shot at Kelly Pavlik.

Recently on Friday Nights Fights, during the Margarito managed Miguel Vazquez match, Sergio stated that he believed Pavlik faked an infection to duck him, and also stated that he wasn’t going anywhere.

Many at OnThEGRINDBoXing believed that Mora shouldn’t even get this shot at Pavlik, and that Pavlik should go on to face someone like a Sergio Martinez or a Vernon Forrest. I think The Latin Snake deserves his shot for a couple of reasons. For starters there is the fact that he won the original season of The Contender, and beat a stable of good and established fighters (including my friend Peter Manfredo Jr.).

After he survived the show with his undefeated record intact, he went on to beat Vernon Forrest, in a match where it was obvious that he trained very hard, and outboxed Forrest. Many people still looked at this as a bad Vernon performance instead of a great Mora performance. Then Forrest came back, and defeated him in impressive fashion, and hats off to Vernon, but that has only evened the score cards, and does establish that one boxer is better than the other any more than the result of their first bout did. Showing that he can hang in there with somebody that fights at the level of a Vernon Forrest, he proved that he can hang with the best of them, and can possibly go on to beat Kelly Pavlik.

My final argument is a simple one… the match was done! Papers were signed, they had a venue, and the match was scheduled to take place, and it should take place. If Pavlik did not want this match he could of chose not to accept it in the beginning, but the match was a done deal, and it should happen.

Now, will Mora win or not? I don’t know. The answer to the question depends on the version of Kelly Pavlik we see come into the ring that night as much as any other factor considered in this fight that must be made.