Check, Please

Congratulations are in store for Kelly Pavlik. Kelly Pavlik won the WBC and WBO middleweight boxing championships, making him one of the 12 or so middleweight boxing champs. And he got paid! P-A-I-D!

Pavlik earned a gross purse of $1.05 million Saturday. After the fight, the New Jersey Athletic Board of Control presented Pavlik with a check for $666,750, which represented his share of the earnings after his managers, trainers and all fees were paid.

Only one problem.

“It’s about an hour from Atlantic City to Philadelphia and we were literally halfway there when out of nowhere, it just hit me,” Mike Pavlik said. “My heart stopped and I just knew I had made a big mistake.”

That mistake was leaving checks totally more than three-quarters of a million dollars on a countertop leaning against the coffee pot in their hotel room. In his excitement to get home, Mike Pavlik forgot to pick up the checks.

“I think I gave that maid probably the best tip she ever got,” he said, forcing a laugh. The new champion took the news as he takes pretty much everything else: Calmly and without a lot of excitement.

He rarely gets nervous or upset, even with some of boxing’s hardest punchers coming after him, and he didn’t seem particularly bothered that the largest payday of his seven-year pro career had been misplaced.

“A check that big, it was going to be pretty difficult for someone to be able to cash it,” he said. “I figured that somehow or other, we’d manage to either get it back or get a new one. My Dad might have been a little worried, but I wasn’t too upset.”

Pavlik did indeed get a new check, and the first check was canceled. Really though, this whole thing could have been avoided if Pavlik had gotten a giant cardboard check. Those things are the best, and quite difficult to lose. And I know a liquor store that will cash them 24 hours a day.