Pavlik Live | Ready to Rumble

We're about 45 minutes away from Kelly Pavlik's "WBC Eliminator Fight" against Edison Miranda at the FedEx Forum in Memphis. Pavlik's fight will be the eighth fight of the night and the co-feature fight. WBC champion Jermain Taylor will fight Cory Spinks in the Main Event. This will be Spinks' first fight as a middleweight.

Miranda is a slight favorite over Pavlik (at least according to the betting in Vegas) but most observers feel the fight could go either way. Few people expect it to go the distance. Both fighters are power punchers and both have been knocked down.

Final thoughts before the fight:

1. Taylor is staying at the Westin across the street from the FedEx Forum. How do I know this? Because his black Lamborghini is parked outside.

2. Man alive, there are a lot of homeless people in Memphis. I've probably been approached by six or seven people (including a guy who stopped in his car in the middle of the street) asking for money. I gave one guy all the change in my pocket, which was about 32 cents. (Almost enough for a postage stamp!)

3. The best of the seven "other" fights on tonight's card was a Heavyweight bout between Joe Stofle (of St. Charles, Mo.) and Chazz Witherspoon (of Philadelphia). Stofle looks a lot like former heavyweight contender Butterbean. By the middle of the first round, he was the crowd favorite. Mainly because he was getting killed but he kept coming. They stopped the fight in the middle of the third round after his nose exploded. I'll admit -- I was pulling for him. For one, his name is Joe. Two, he's from St. Charles, which is where I lived when I interned for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch six years ago. It's about 40 minutes outside St. Louis (which I didn't know when I got the apartment) and it's a nice town, if you ignore the fact that my apartment was the size of a closet and my car stereo got stolen while I was there.

4. Jim Lampley and Lennox Lewis are doing the commentary for tonight's fights on HBO. If you don't have HBO, I'll give round-by-round updates on Vindy.com and I'll also have stories in Sunday's and Monday's Vindicator. If the stories aren't good, please be kind. I have to write and blog while the fight is going on to make deadline. If this sounds like a built-in excuse, well, it probably is.

For a photo gallery of the fight, click here.