By Michael Woods

Main Events is a family shop. Company CEO Kathy Duva keeps the circle tight, and no, their roster isn’t beefy along the lines of the ones that Top Rank and Golden Boy can boast about.

Duva’s Main Events is a lean machine, and so when one of the upper tier Main Events crew takes a hit, the company isn’t as quick to shrug off the pain as some larger entities are.

So, yes, on Saturday night, after midnight, Kathy Duva wasn’t in a sprightly mood. Her main man, Sergey Kovalev, had been dropped three times and knocked out by Eleider Alvarez, who was the better man in Atlantic City, in a light heavyweight title fight which unfolded on HBO.

A loss to a Kovalev isn’t quickly shaken off, being that he’s Main Events’ main attraction. But it must be said, Duva has done this rodeo circuit a few times. Top dogs have been bit and the company has been forced to adapt before, in her 40 years in the business.

So, Duva took a little bit of time to lick her wounds. She conferred with family, and re-set her perspectives POV with some friends who were in town, people she’d expected to party with in a celebratory fashion, after the “Krusher” did the expected, and dispatched with the Colombian Canadian Alvarez.

On Monday, I checked in with Duva, and asked how the 35 year old Russian hitter is feeling.

“Sergey is good,” Duva told me. “We got him a CAT scan Saturday night just to be safe. He already told me he has no desire to end his career like that,  so he will rest for a while and then we will make a plan to go forward.”

Much chatter centered on whether or not Kovalev (32-3-1) would soldier on after being stopped for the second time in his pro career, which began in 2009. So, barring a change of heart, it looks like there is at least one more chapter in the book of Kovalev’s fighting life to be written. Duva offered up her take on something that perhaps could be tweaked, to get him back on the win track.

“He fought brilliantly,” the New Jersey fixture said. “But his conditioning failed him again. Personally, I think he needs to bring in someone with experience training older athletes. I know that Tom Brady, for example, does not eat or train or play the same way that he did in his 20s. And neither should Sergey.”

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