By Dan Ambrose: To say that WBC heavyweight champion Samuel Peter (30-2, 23 KOs) performed poorly on Saturday night would be a tremendous understatement. Peter, 28, looked plain awful in losing by an 8th round stoppage to Vitali Klitschko, a fight in which Peter acted as a huge human punching bag for the 6’8″ Ukrainian until finally ending the fight on a sour note by quitting on his stool after the 8th round. As bad as Peter looked, the fight probably could have been stopped by the 5th round and I’d have no argument with it.

Peter had a serious case of failure to launch as he looked like he wasn’t all there, mentally defeated even before the first round got underway. If this was a one fight anomaly I could let it go and chalk it up as a case of Peter just having an off night, but he’s looked bad in several of his last seven fights, starting with his loss to Wladimir Klitschko in 2005. He fought at one pace that night, and looked more like a limited plodder than a legitimate top contender. In his two bouts with James Toney, Peter struggled to beat a 5’9″ former super middleweight nearing 40. Peter’s fight with Jameel McCline, a light puncher at best, in which Peter was knocked all around the ring, getting dropped three times in the first couple of rounds, seemed to suggest that Peter may not be belong in the top tier of heavyweights.

Although he did well in beating a 39 year-old Oleg Maskaev by a 6th round stoppage, the fight was far less impressive than it should have been given Maskaev’s prior surgery for a back problem, which kept him from fighting Peter for almost two years. Maskaev had no tune-up fights and went straight into the fight with Peter after a long period out of action, and even then he succeeded in rocking Peter with a powerful right hand in the 6th. Peter’s fight with Vitali seemed to be the culmination of three years of less than impressive performances by Peter, and it begs the question whether Peter will continue to be a factor in the division.

Skill-wise, he doesn’t match up with many of the other top heavyweights like Juan Carlos Gomez, Alexander Dimitrenko, Tony Thompson, Alexander Povetkin and David Haye, to name just a few. Certainly, he has the power to beat any of them if he can land his big shots, but it’s unclear whether he can fight hard enough to land his big bombs. If Saturday’s performance against Vitali is any indication of how Peter will be fighting in the future, then he needs to seriously consider hanging up his gloves for good and retiring from the sport.

If he fights that way against one of the better heavyweights, Peter will likely take an even worse beating than Vitali inflicted upon him. He got off easy with Vitali, because he’s an older, slower heavyweight and he wasn’t loading up on his shots like a younger, faster heavyweight like Dimitrenko, Haye or Povetkin would do. Peter would take a serious beating by any of those fighters and would have probably been stopped much sooner.

Looking into my crystal ball, I don’t see anything good coming for Peter in the coming years. I think he’s finished as a fighter, and though he’ll probably stubbornly stick around the sport for another decade or so, he’s going to be more or less fodder for the young heavyweights in the division.