By Eric Thomaas: 39-year-old Jean Marc Mormeck (36-5, 22 KO’s seemed frozen by the moment tonight in facing IBF/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko (57-3, 50 KO’s) in front of 50,000 fans in the ESPRIT arena, Düsseldorf, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany. Mormeck never did get his offense un-tracked in losing by a 4th round TKO defeat in one of the worst mismatches for Wladimir since his 2nd round TKO win over Ray Austin in March 2007.

Mormeck was down in the 2nd and 4th rounds and just looked paralyzed not knowing what to do. But he simply wouldn’t or couldn’t throw punches in the fight and it rather peculiar because in his past three fights at heavyweight, Mormeck had shown an excellent workrate in winning those fights. But against Wladimir, Mormeck was immobilized physically and never did throw many pun hes and he landed in the single digits in all four rounds of action.

Wladimir focused on sending straight right hands through Mormeck’s guard in rounds one and two, and finding him more often than not. Mormeck’s bob and weave style was ineffective to Wladimir straight rights because even if he wasn’t hitting center to Mormeck’s face, he was still hitting Mormeck on the top of his head, side of his face or in the chest area. It looked funny to see how huge Wladimir was compared to Mormeck. It looked like a smaller cruiserweight wondered into the ring against the giant Wladimir and didn’t know to do in there. Talk about a mismatch. This was about as bad as they come.

Wladimir finally connected with a solid right that sent Mormeck to the canvas on all fours. He was clearly hurt by the shot and perhaps didn’t see it coming because he was holding his gloves up in front of his eyes, shielding his own vision. Mormeck took heavy punishment after he got back to his feet and to his credit he was able to take some big shots without crumbing. A fighter with less experience than him would have been goners under similar circumstances.

The situation didn’t improve for Mormeck in this third round, because be continued to get pelted with right hands down the middle by Wladimir and ate a lot of hard jabs to the head as well. Mormeck kept coming forward but was walking into a lot of heavy artillery from Wladimir and doing little other than trying to block shots and clinch. Even with his gloves up in front of his face, Mormeck was still getting hit hard due to Wladimir’s shots knocking Mormeck’s own gloves into his face from the impact of the blows.

Wladimir mercifully put Mormeck away in the 4th when he blasted him with a nice left followed by a right hand that put Mormeck down for the second and final time in the fight badly hurt.