The road to redemption for Kelly Pavlik does not run through Youngstown, Ohio.If the former middleweight champion, once one of boxing's bright young stars, is able to pull himself up from the depths to which alcoholism dragged him down, he will have to do it anywhere but in his hometown.
Youngstown, a blue-collar Rust Belt city, is where Pavlik started his career and where he nearly ended it. And if the soon-to-be 30-year-old fighter wants to reap the benefits that come with being promoted by Top Rank, it will have to be accomplished in Elsewhere, USA.
"We understood, or believed we understood, psychologically, what the problem was," Top Rank chairman Bob Arum said by phone recently. "Youngstown, which is nice people, a hardscrabble town, but he was, at one point, the most prominent guy in the town. He had won the middleweight title, and in a town like that, particularly when you're a young man, there's a compulsion to be one of the guys.
"So you knock down a couple of beers. Some people can handle it, and some people can't.
"He couldn't."
Continue Reading: usatoday.com
Leave a comment