By Allan Fox: Former middleweight contender David Lemieux (25-2, 24 KO’s) will be attempting to turn his career around on Friday night in an eight round bout against Jaudiel Zepeda (12-5-1, 9 KO’s) at the Bell Centre, in Montreal, Canada.

Both Lemieux and the 29-year-old Zepeda have lost their last two bouts, although there’s a lot more expected of the 23-year-old Lemieux. He was thought by some to be a potential future world champion at middleweight. However, his ambition was shocked into reality when he was upset last year by middleweight contender Marco Antonio Rubio in a 7th round TKO loss in April 2011.

Lemieux came back eight months later in what some thought would be a fairly safe fight against 36-year-old former WBA World light middleweight champion Joachim Alcine. But once again, Lemieux was beaten, this time by a 12 round majority decision. Lemieux was pretty clearly beaten in that fight and deserved to lose by a unanimous decision rather than a majority decision. Like in his fight against Rubio, Lemieux got tired and ran out of gas in the second half of the fight. However, he never really dominated like he did with Rubio, and seemed to be fighting without the confidence that he previously had.

The move back down to 8 round fights would appear to be an effort for Lemieux to try and address his stamina problems. He fights well for five rounds, but really gasses out from the 6th round on. Even an eight round bout might be a problem for Lemieux if he’s fighting on fumes from the 6th round on. He likely won’t have a problem with stamina in this Friday’s fight, because Zepeda has been beaten a number of times, and will likely cave in early from a vicious assault by Lemieux. But Lemieux will have to deal with trying to find a way for him to be able to fight longer periods of time without fading so badly.

A big part of the problem for Lemieux is that he has some many early knockouts on his resume from soft match-making. He’s only fought beyond the 6th round three times in his five-year pro career. This obviously has hurt his ability to increase his stamina. His big power and tendency to go all out to score early knockouts has led to many of his fights ending in the 1st or 2nd rounds.

What Lemieux really needed was for him to be slowly built up against guys that could take his power and give him some rounds. Additionally, he needed to focus on extending the fights by learning how to box rather than just trying to impress the crowds by destroying his opposition. Lemieux was supposed to be learning things with from all of his early fights, but because he was trying to so hard to KO everyone quickly, he didn’t build up his endurance and probably didn’t learn a whole lot from those earlier fights.