By Aaron Klein: With the recent announcement of former WBC Vitali Klitschko (35-2, 34 KOs) and the current WBC heavyweight champion Samuel Peter (30-1, 23 KOs) to fight in October for the championship, one has to wonder how much Vitali will have left for the bout. If this fight were four years ago, the last time Vitali set foot in the ring, I and probably a lot of other people would assume that Vitali would win with relative ease. After all, his chin was one of the sturdiest in the heavyweight division at the time and he had one of the best right hands in the business. In addition, with Vitali’s size – 6’8” 250 lbs – and his ability to choose whether to box or slug, he was more than a match for perhaps any heavyweight in the division.

In his prime, Vitali rarely lost a round to any of his opponents, even against Lennox Lewis in their June 2003 bout. With the ability to use his long jab, left hook, and his powerful right hand, a prime Vitali would have been more than a match for Peter. Indeed, Peter would have been hard pressed to do much with Vitali at all except for to land an occasional shot or two. It would have been a fight that Vitali would have had little trouble, perhaps beating Peter as easily as he did Kirk Johnson, Danny Williams and Ross Puritty. For some reason, Vitali always seemed to do incredibly well against big sluggers like Peter, for which he would often be able to box from a distance, slowly picking them apart much in the same way that a person would peel the wings off a butterfly.

He would calmly take whatever big shots his opponents would occasionally hit him with, and then answer back with jabs and big right hands. For all his size, Vitali was never easy to hit because he had an uncanny ability to use his size and lean away from incoming blows. It will be interesting to see if he still has any remnants of his once excellent boxing skills, because if he does then Peter is in for big trouble come this October when the two meet up. Not having had any fights in the past four years, it’s questionable whether Vitali’s chin is as good as it once was.

Normally, a fighters ability to take a punch diminishes with a lot of time away from the ring, for it’s in the sparring sessions that they get accustomed to getting hit. However, some fighters, George Foreman, for instance, showed no ill effects of his 10 years away from the ring. Indeed, his chin was perhaps even better after his comeback compared to earlier in his career when he was getting hurt with regularity in bouts with Muhammed Ali, Jimmy Young and Ron Lyle. This is something that we’ll have to find out about once he gets in the ring with Peter, I guess. But, if Vitali still has his iron chin, that effectively spells doom for Peter, since he doesn’t have nearly the same boxing skills as Vitali and never will for that matter.

In the absence of a knockout or several knockdowns, Peter couldn’t hope to beat Vitali by a unanimous decision. I can’t see Peter knocking Vitali down multiple times like he did with his soft-chinned brother, Wladimir Klitschko. For this reason, I think Peter has to hope that he can knock Vitali out clean with a combination of big shots, because if he gets up from a knockdown he’ll likely compensate by using his jab and clinching, not giving Peter another chance to score another knockdown. Vitali is a much better boxer than Peter, and that means that the Nigerian fighter is going to have to go all out and try to knock him out as early possible in the bout.

Peter tends to tire in the later rounds of his fights and doesn’t have the same power on his shots than he does early on. Peter may be the hardest puncher in the division, but if he can’t put enough punches together than it’s meaningless. I see Vitali coming back with one of his best fights of his career, and scoring a shocking knockout over Peter. It’s will be even more shocking because people will be figuring on Peter winning the fight by knockout and will be in for a big surprise when Vitali is the one that scores the knockout victory.

I don’t even see the fight as being close, because Vitali won’t give up a round in winning a huge one-sided fight. In beating Peter, Vitali will further expose Peter as being a crude slugger, only capable of beating B & C level fighters but not a top level fighter with a good chin like