By Scott Gilfoid: #6 WBO 168 pound contender Vincent Feigenbutz (18-1, 17 KOs) will be taking a huge step up in class next month when he faces unbeaten #7 WBO Balazs Kelemen (22-0, 13 KOs) in a 12 round bout on March 21st at the Rostock, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. The 19-year-old Feigenbutz will be defending his WBO Inter-Continental super middleweight title.
According to Fightnews, Feigenbutz wants to go after the interim World Boxing Organization title after he gets past the 6’2 ½” Kelemen.
It’s hard to say whether Feigenbutz can beat Kelemen, because his opposition has been so poor since he turned pro in 2011. Feigenbutz was knocked out in his second fight as a pro in a 3rd round stoppage to Roman Javoey in March 2012. Oddly enough, Feigenbutz never avenged the loss and Javoey has since been beaten by two obscure fighters named Alexander Hagen and Oatrick Dobroschi by early stoppages.
Precisely why Feigenbutz was handled so easily by Javoey in an early stoppage is unclear, but whatever the case, it sends out red flags about how good Feigenbutz’s punch resistance is. I mean, it’s not as if Feigenbutz’s opposition has been fierce since that fight.
If you look at the fighters that Feigenbutz’s been beating, they in many cases have God awful records. Even the ones that Feigenbutz beat with winning records, they got their victories over little known opposition. That kind of tells you a little something, doesn’t it?
In Feigenbutz’s last four fights he’s beaten the following guys: Ionut Trandafir Illie, Olegs Fedotovs, Guram Natsulishvillo and Slavisa Simeunovic. I can’t say any of them are household names. It just looks like Feigenbutz is being steadily matched against fodder in fight after fight.
In looking at some of Feigenbutz’s previous fights, he reminds me a lot of British heavyweight Anthony Joshua, a fighter loaded with muscles but slow of hand and foot, and flat-footed without the explosive fighter that you see in Deontay Wilder. Feigenbutz, 19, definitely has heavy hands.
You can see that from watching one of his fights, but all of the muscles he carries on his upper body makes him kind of slow to where he’s pushing his punches instead of exploding with them. Like I said, it’s very similar to Anthony Joshua.
Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s possible for Feigenbutz to increase the snap that he has on his punches without him losing some of the excess muscle he has in his upper body. But there’s a risk in Feigenbutz taking off muscle. If he loses the muscle weight, he could be weakened to the point where doesn’t stand a chance against the other super middleweights. He would obviously have to move down to the middleweight division if he lost some of the excess muscles in his upper body. But right now, Feigenbutz looks more like a body builder rather than a fighter in my view.
If you look at Feigenbutz’s fight against Guram Natsulishvili in September of 2014, you can see that Feigenbutz was frequently blocking Natsulishvili’s punches with his face, and he looked really slow of hand.
Feigenbutz looked like a slower version of Mikkel Kessler, but without his height. Feigenbutz looks like he’s around the same height at the 5’9” Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, which obviously isn’t a good thing given that Feigenbutz is fighting at super middleweight against much taller fighters.
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