PAVLIK ROUNDUP |News and notes

Live weigh-in: HBO will broadcast today’s weigh-in of Kelly Pavlik and Jermain Taylor live on HBO.com at 5:30 p.m. The weigh-in will be held inside Studios A&B next to the MGM Grand Garden Arena and is open to the public. September’s weigh-in in Atlantic City was extremely loud and extremely pro-Pavlik and this one will likely be the same. Pavlik’s trainer, Jack Loew, said he thinks there could be even more Youngstown-area fans than there were in Atlantic City, when at least 5,000 made the six-hour drive to the coast. “There are a lot of people from Ohio who live in Vegas, Phoenix and California,” he said. Pavlik weighed in at 163 1/2 pounds earlier this week after training and estimated he was right at the weight limit of 166 pounds Thursday.
ESPN admirer: Howie Schwab of ESPN2’s “Stump the Schwab” will be wearing Pavlik gear on “First Take” this morning. Schwab’s segment normally airs around 11:30 a.m. and also at 1:30 p.m. Schwab, a fan of Pavlik and Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini, is friends with Brookfield native Mark Bercik, author of “America’s Complete Sports Scholarship Guide.”
See no evil: Pavlik’s mother, Debbie, can’t bring herself to watch her son’s fights live, but she typically watches them on tape soon afterward. “If it’s somebody else’s baby, you can watch it,” Debbie said. “When it’s your baby, it’s a hard thing to do.” She stayed in her Atlantic City hotel room in September and waited to hear the result from her son, Mike. When she watched the replay the next day, however, she skipped the second round (when Kelly was knocked down). “I still haven’t seen the second round,” Debbie said. “My husband won’t watch the second round, either. We’ve seen the fight 10 times, but we always start in the third round.” Debbie did join the Pavlik camp for the post-fight party at Bally’s, where hundreds of Youngstown-area fans gathered to celebrate the win. “It was unbelievable. I had goose bumps,” she said. “And those faces were so familiar. I bet I knew 100 people in that casino. People who went to school with me or with my husband. And everybody was screaming. It was just amazing.”

Joe Scalzo