Jesse Brinkley looks to topple the great Lucian Bute
Some five years after competing on the first season of “The Contender” reality TV series, Jesse Brinkley has an opportunity to win the IBF super middleweight title.
Brinkley takes on the winning Lucian Bute Friday in Montreal, in a battle that has the deck stacked against him. Bute is arguably the best super middleweight out there, a southpaw who is both a mechanic
and an artist in the ring, and who will be fighting in his hometown. That isn’t even to mention that Bute has won 26 consecutive bouts, and stopped five of his last six opponents in title fights.
Peter Manfredo Sr., Brinkley’s trainer, confirmed the magnitude of Brinkley’s opponent, but argued his fighter was just as prepared.
“It's a difficult fight, but [Brinkley is] physically prepared. He's done over 150 rounds of sparring, and we've got a lot of southpaws here--and some good ones: Demetrius Andrade, the [2008] Olympics
kid; Vladine Biosse, the undefeated tough fighter out of Providence; and a bunch of others. [Brinkley's] head is on straight, he's been dieting correctly, he's been looking pretty good in sparring, and he's ready to go," said Manfredo to ESPN.com.
Actually, Brinkley looked his best ever in his last fight, against Curtis Stevens in January. Though he was an underdog coming into the fight, Brinkley visibly out-boxed Stevens, and almost knocked him
out in the last round. While that may have hyped Brinkley up, it didn’t get in the way of Manfredo’s respect for Bute: “[Bute's] a lot more difficult than Curtis Stevens. He's difficult to defend against, he tries to bring you into shots, he steps back,
he looks to counter, he's got a nice little jab—but we're going to give it our best shot. He's got to do the best he can.”
For all his accolades, Bute is not an invincible fighter. He was knocked out as an amateur, and was desperate in the last round of his first fight with Librado Andrade. These are the incentive pieces
for Brinkley’s camp. At the same time though, Bute bounced back from the close call with Andrade, to easily demolish him in the fourth round of their rematch with a brutal body punch.
Likewise, in his last fight against Edison Miranda, Bute was equally exceptional, managing to knock out Miranda with an invisible uppercut in the third round moments after Miranda seemed to taunt him.
That victory came 11 months after Miranda was defeated by WBA super middle weight champion Andre Ward, who currently leads the rankings in the Super Six boxing tournament.
With peak physical conditioning, it's possible that Brinkley will be able to avoid devastation for the first six rounds, but after that the fighters’ respective skill-sets will set in and Bute will likely
dominate. Bute is a supremely accurate fighter who doesn’t throw for the sake of throwing. And Brinkley has shown that while he has considerable skills in the ring, he is not on par with the best in the world. He has been defeated five times as a professional,
which isn’t saying much against the best of the best.
Prediction: Bute by KO, round eight.
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