Paul Williams pricing himself out of Pavlik fight

[Lance Uppercut]

I agree, why the heck isn't Pavlik moving forward with that fight? The contract has been made. Pavlik and his people have a lot of nerve talking about people pricing themselves out or ducking when they can't even honor a contract for Pavlik's middleweight title, shouldn't he have been stripped by now?

I don't know what their reason is for not honoring it, but I think it's bull$hit. If he doesn't honor the contract, I'm going to lose a lot of respect for him, which I hate to say, because I've been following his career for a long time, since he's a local guy. Between this, and his stupid a$$ comments about the SMW tournament, he has been turning me off lately. His attitude, and behavior is not becoming of the working class people he says that he represents. Here, your word, or even a handshake means something when you make a deal, and here he is, not even honoring a written contract.

What exactly happened between Kelly and Sergio ? Did Kelly just pull the plug on the contract ?

Well the contract is still valid actually. They both signed the contract, and in the contract it states that neither of them could take a fight beforehand. Sergio started training, and they were supposed to have the official press conference to announce the fight on the day of the Hatton/Pac fight. But 2 days before that, Pavlik said he wasn't coming, and they resceduled it for the next week. And just before the rescheduled conference could happen, that's when the bout was cancelled because of the bullshit staph infection story.

Sergio was then told that the fight would take place in September. Well nothing was happening, and then all the talk about Pavlik fighting other guys started, and Sergio was like WTF?

So now, Sergio can't take a fight, because then he would be breaching his contract. So he's sitting idle, when he should be fighting. If, and when Pavlik signs to fight someone other than Sergio. Sergio's lawyer is slapping a breach of contract lawsuit on Top Rank, Team Pavlik, and even Tournament of Contenders, because TOC hasn't done $hit to push things along.

Sergio may be in the right here, but leaving out the contractual issues I'd prefer to see KP fighting someone else. There have been talks of him against Bute or Balszay at 168 or Sturm at 160 ESPN.com's division-by-division rankings - ESPN. I'd prefer any of those options to a fight with Sergio. Nothing against Sergio, but he won't hurt KP and the only way he can win is by making the fight a boring fight.

The ringtv.com reported today that Pavlik is also negotiating with Winky Wright. Strum has been removed from consideration after announcing that he will not fight again until 2010.

Bob Arum is a Harvard lawyer. If there was a way to wiggle out of the Mora contract, I am sure he could find it. It seems like the Pavlik camp believes that the "injury" voided the contract.