"I keep saying you're only as good as your last fight and you gotta keep winning. You put the time in, you put the work in, and the results will come. You gotta watch the outside (laughing). The outside life, I did, and even still some of the things I did was blown up because of the local media. These guys, you gotta stay in that box and have the right people around you and that's the biggest thing," stated former undisputed middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik, who offered advices to the next generation of boxers. Check it out!
PC: You retired at 30 years old. A lot of these younger guys seem to think this will last forever. Now that you are 5 years removed and you've had time to reflect, what advice would you give some of these younger guys?
KP: No, it don't last forever. You're only as good as your last fight. It's a cutthroat sport and business; it really is. You know, me and my dad was talking the other day. They had the fights on, I can't remember which one, but it was about a month ago and they had a young prospect coming up and he was 17-0 and the kid he was fighting was 17-1 and we were laughing because we were like, "Man, when we were at that point, we didn't realize how great that was and how damaging that could be." That one loss at 17-0, a lot of times that kid gotta start over. Especially if you're fighting a kid that's say 15-4, that's not that great of a record, but if you're at 17-0, you're that close and you take a loss, especially if you get knocked out or hit with a fluke punch, now you're starting all over again or you took a big step back. It is short lived. If there was any advice that I could give, it would be to have a really good manager. I was blessed to have Cameron Dunkin. I shouldn't even say that because I worked my butt off to get to somebody like Cameron Dunkin in the amateurs. He is probably the best manager ever in boxing and I'm not just saying that because he was my manager, but he really took his guys and he had a bond with them outside of boxing too. You don't see that that much in boxing. Do that and training, man, you gotta take on every fight because you don't have a teammate in that ring. I keep saying you're only as good as your last fight and you gotta keep winning. You put the time in, you put the work in, and the results will come. You gotta watch the outside (laughing). The outside life, I did, and even still some of the things I did was blown up because of the local media. These guys, you gotta stay in that box and have the right people around you and that's the biggest thing.
PC: I've always thought you suffered a little bit from being from a small town. Not to say that you didn't do your fair share of wrong, but being from Youngstown couldn't have helped because you're right, the local media in small towns like that is always in search of a headline story and anything they can grab is escalated times ten.
KP: Yeah, and that happens. A lot of times, did I give people reason to say things? Yeah, I did. I'm not saying, "Hey man, I got a halo; look at this halo shine!" But I'm human and I'm like everybody else and I was just doing my thing. But unfortunately for me, I'm not in a situation to be like everybody else in Youngstown. It's actually looked and frowned upon. You touched on it and you look at my incidents compared to what other athletes get involved in and other things that have happened and it's peanuts. But peanuts is peanuts and bad ink is bad ink and I'm not happy about it either.
But that being said, most of that happened at the end of my career and I did what I had to do. But for these young kids coming up...when I was young, I worked and trained. My training was my job. I trained like 7 hours a day; everything was boxing. The fun and the parties and doing this and doing that, that was for not. That didn't exist with me then. It was boxing, boxing, boxing and fighting and fighting. When I first turned pro, if you go on boxrec, I was fighting every month or every other month. That's the thing, you just gotta stay busy, stay healthy as far as injuries, and work. In the business...I don't really like to do it, but I try to be as honest with some people as I possibly can be, so if a kid comes and says he wants to turn pro and I don't think that he's ready enough, I'm trying to be a nice guy, but I can't sugarcoat it. If I don't think you could be a world champ or make good money, I kind of would actually try to have them go another route. And I know it's not good and you're hurting people's dream, but this business is not the business you go in because it's fun and you love it. This is a business where you go into it if you have 4 National championships and you qualified for the Olympic team. That's when it's a reality to go pro in my opinion.
PC: Any regrets about your own career?
KP: I would like to give you my regrets, but I'm sure the responses that you get from my regrets, I don't know if I want to see that (laughing). But you know, I've been retired for 5 years, so I have nothing to lose or gain, or I don't feel the need to make anything up because it's not going to make or break me, but yeah, there really is some regrets. There really, really is. I'll start off, and I'll tell you the truth, and I'm not taking the victory away from the guy, he beat my ass (laughing), you know what I mean, but the Bernard Hopkins fight was a schooling that I got. But with that fight, I sparred 3 times for that fight. I had bursitis going into training camp and then unfortunately with that, you try to overcompensate to try not to re-injure that and I ended up getting tendonitis. It was just a pain in the butt, and then, with Robert Garcia, he also had Steven Luevano at the time and he was the co-main event. We came down with bronchitis on Thursday, the day before the weigh-in, and I remember we couldn't take the inhaler because it had a steroid in it to break up the stuff in the chest. So we had to take a pill that we ended up putting in Steven Luevano's name because Cameron Dunkin was his manager too; that way Hopkins couldn't find out that I was sick. It was just one of them fights. When it originally first happened with the sparring and everything with my elbow, I shouldn't have had them cancel the fight, but to just push that fight back. But my big concern was all of the fans that bought the tickets and was already out there.
And then the second regret was the Martinez fight. Of course my biggest regrets are my two losses, but I'm just being honest about what was going on. Like I said, I've been retired for 5 years; I have nothing to gain by lying or making up stories at this point. The cutting of the weight and how bad that was, and that was a documented thing too. They mentioned it on HBO, when they came to my room, I had a stationary bike in there and a treadmill in my hotel room. It was just brutal...brutal trying to make that 160 mark. What I should have done, but I was really against it, I knew that was my last fight at middleweight, so I should have just came in heavy. That one pound would have been a difference of 6 hours the night before and getting up at 4 in the morning and working out before the weigh-ins and trying to get that weight off. It came to the point where the sauna didn't work no more. We couldn't get a bead of sweat out of me. I could have just said, "Hey, strip me, this is my last fight at middleweight anyway." I should have come in at 161.5 or 162 and that would have made a world of difference in that fight because if you go back and watch the fight, I was winning after the 9th round on the scorecards. You can see in that 10th round, not lung-wise, I wasn't tired like winded, but you can just see my legs were in quick sand. If you watch that fight again, you can see where I just hit the wall in the 10th round from making weight. Just that one simple thing we could have done for that Martinez fight, and in the Hopkins fight...you're talking about pushing the Hopkins fight back 2 months and coming in a pound or two heavier for the Martinez fight. That's not to say the outcome would have changed, but I would have given myself a better chance at winning had I just made those few changes. But again, with rescheduling, those fans had already went out from Youngstown and bought the tickets and I was that hard-headed kid that instead of listening to people who wanted me to move it back, I was too worried that I was going to piss off the hometown guys and all of the people that bought the tickets. And with just coming in a little bit heavier for Martinez, it wasn't thought through very well and I was and still am kind of against that. I'm just big on making the target weight and not giving up your title on the scale.
[ Follow Percy Crawford on Twitter @MrLouis1ana ]