By Sean McDaniel: Undefeated IBF super middleweight champion Lucian Bute (22-0, 18 KOs) will be facing his toughest battle to date when he defends his IBF title against his number #1 challenger once-beaten Librado Andrade (27-1, 21 KOs) in a scheduled 12-round bout at the Bell Centre, Montreal, in Quebec, Canada. Bute, 28, a former amateur star from Romania now living and fighting out of Canada, is making his 2nd defense of his IBF super middleweight title which he won in a 11th round TKO of Colombian knockout artist Alejandro Berrio in October 2007.
Since then, Bute has defended the title once, beating a badly shot 37 year-old William Joppy in a 10th round TKO in February, a fight which created a stir in the boxing community because many felts felt that Bute should have been looking towards fighting a more worthy opponent than Joppy, who had done little in recent years to deserve a title shot. However, Bute appeared to want an easy fight over a big-named opponent, even if it meant fighting a fighter that was well past his prime. In facing Andrade, 29, Bute is going from one extreme to the other, facing perhaps the best non-champion in the division.
Andrade has looked especially good in his last three fights, beating Ted Muller, Yusaf Mack and Robert Stieglitz in succession, to put himself in the position as Bute’s number #1 mandatory challenger. In a way, this fight is like a rematch of Andrade’s title challenge against then WBA/WBC super middleweight champion Mikkel Kessler a year ago in March 2007, a fight in which Kessler gave Andrade a boxing lesson, winning all 12-rounds and beating him with relative ease.
Bute, however, isn’t in the same league as Kessler, and, in fact, if often called a poor man’s Kessler by some boxing fans. Indeed, Bute does fight a lot like Kessler, jabbing constantly, retreating whenever an opponent comes forward, throwing hooks and on the move continuously. Bute, though, doesn’t have quite the same skills as Kessler in hand speed or the ability to get out of the way of punches. However, he does seem an equal – or maybe even a shade better – at retreating when attacked by an opponent. This is perhaps what makes Bute so tough to fight.
He fights on his own terms, jabbing, throwing combinations, but when faced with reciprocal aggression, he flees backwards firing punches as he backs away. In that way, he’s very tough to deal with, for the only way to lay a glove on him for any length of time is by running after him and trying to stay on top of him continuously. It’s not easy to do, because he constantly backs away and is quite good at dodging attacks, and hitting his opponents as they go rushing by. In a way, he fights like a bull fighter, hitting the bull with darts, then running backwards, sometimes laterally, to get away.
If you chase him, he’s going to hit you while on the retreat and perhaps nail you with something big if you fly past him. The only time he’s really susceptible is when he’s standing in front of his opponents trying to land his jabs or hooks, and when he is pushed up to the ropes and trapped. While on the ropes, he immediately grabs his opponent in a clinch, preventing them from getting off more than a shot or two. As such, he’s very hard to beat no matter what style his opponent is using.
Andrade isn’t particularly fast at cutting off the ring, nor a very big puncher. He seems to do best when he’s faced with an opponent that stands directly in front of him and lets him get his shots off, like German fighter Stieglitz allowed him to do in their fight in March. Andrade did poorly against Kessler, unable to catch up with him, match his speed from the outside, or get out of the way of his jabs. Andrade doesn’t have much of a jab, and is rather average from the outside, which would seem to suggest that his only chance is to try and pin Bute to the ropes and pound away on him.
He won’t be able to beat Bute at the center of the ring, because Bute retreats too often, and would never stand and trade shots with him for more than a few seconds without backing away. I don’t see this match-up going well for Andrade, who won’t be able to stay on top of Bute enough to get his high volume offense in gear. Bute may be a poor imitation of Kessler, but he’s close enough to still be much more than Andrade can hope to handle. If both fighters were to stand toe-to-toe for 12-rounds, I have no doubt that Andrade would easily beat Bute, perhaps even knock him out.
But, Bute isn’t that type of fighter, and will run all round the ring, staying out of reach and firing shots as he’s on the move. It’s a style that he’s been using for some time, one that he is very good at. Andrade has to prove that he can deal with this kind of boxing style, and against Kessler, he showed no ability to know how to compete with it. Even worse, he didn’t show that he could adapt to anything that Kessler was doing in the ring.
To be sure, Andrade has a lot of time to work on solving Bute’s elusive style of fighting, but I’m not so certain that Andrade, given his high volume punching style that requires and opponent to stand directly in front of him, will ever be able to make the needed adjustments to beat a fighter of Bute’s class.