By Chris Williams: Heavyweight contender Eddie Chambers (30-1, 16 KOs) will be making his long awaited return to the boxing ring tonight when he takes on the hard-hitting Raphael Butler (31-4, 24 KOs) tonight in a scheduled 12-round bout for Chamber’s USBA heavyweight title at the Royal Watler Cruise Terminal, in Georgetown, Cayman Islands. For Chambers, currently ranked # 8 in the IBF, it’s been five months since he last fought, losing a 12-round unanimous decision to the Russian heavyweight contender Alexander Povetkin as part of the IBF’s 4-man elimination tournament to face the current champion Wladimir Klitschko.
The loss derailed Chamber’s title hopes, and he’s now starting over again to try and work his way back into a title shot. Known mainly for his fast hands, his excellent defense which often draws comparisons to former heavyweight champion Chris Byrd, and superb boxing skills, Chambers has quickly emblazoned a trail through the heavyweight division in the past three years. During that time, he’s beaten good fighters like journeyman Ross Puritty, Derric Rossy, Dominick Guinn and Calvin Brock.
However, Chambers has also showed some problems with his offense mostly related to his lack of offense. Like Byrd, Chambers suffers from an anemic offense at times, content often just to sit back and look to counter punch his opponents. He often doesn’t make his own opportunities by taking the fight to his opponents and ends up in much closer fights than what it should be considering his excellent boxing skills. Case in point, his fight with Brock (a 12-round split decision win in November 2007) which ended up to be a much closer bout than it should have been due to Chamber’s long stretches of inactivity in the bout.
Often in the early portion of the rounds, Chambers would do next to nothing but hang on the ropes and look for counter shots against Brock. Then in the last minute to thirty seconds of the round, Chambers would all of a sudden fight hard throwing flurries in an effort to try and steal the round. This would be okay of if it was just an anomaly that occurred in this bout. However, this problem had been there in many of his previous fights. Back then, though, it was less of a problem because of Chamber’s mostly limited opposition who were not in the position to take advantage of Chamber’s low work rate and outwork him. However, it caught up with Chambers – as most people expected it would – when he fought Alexander Povetkin, a fighter known for having a very high work rate, in the final of the IBF tournament in January. After doing a decent job of landing shots in rounds one through four, Chambers seemed to almost completely stop punching in the remainder of the fight.
Chambers looked as if he had shot his wad in the first four rounds, and had nothing more to give in rounds five to twelve against Povetkin. The odd thing was, Chambers didn’t really look tired in the least, he just wasn’t throwing punches, aside from a handful of loaded up shots in each round. It was frustrating for me, because he was doing an incredible job in the first four rounds, and had made a mess of Povetkin’s face during that time, yet instead of staying on course and finishing the job, Chambers let Povetkin off the hook, allowing him to control the fight for the rest of the way.
It’s unclear what was holding Chambers back in the second half of the fight, but one would assume its poor conditioning rather than a mental thing. He looks in decent shape for the most part, although he has always been slightly chubby but that’s more of the natural way he’s built than a case of him being out of shape. I’m not precisely sure what it is, but it seems that when he gets into the second of his fights, he tends to work hard only for brief periods on every round – usually in the last half minute.
Since this has been a problem for a large part of his career, I don’t imagine that Chambers made too much progress on getting past this issue. Tonight, it probably won’t be a factor in the fight given the fact that Butler, a good fighter, doesn’t have the boxing skills to contend with Chambers for long and will probably lose handily to him. But, when Chambers begins stepping it up again against better competition, his problem with his poor work rate will spur up again and cause him to either have a much tougher fight than he would normally have or cause him to lose.
Butler, 24, has faced mostly limited competition and has fought mainly C-class opponents. Despite this, he still was shockingly beat by Art Binkowski by an 8th round stoppage in April 2007, a fight that he was expected to win quite handily. Though he’s been fighting already for four years, he’s still fighting largely four to eight round bouts, which seems a little odd to me. One would expect that he’d have moved to at least fighting 10-round bouts by now.
Tonight, he’s going to be taking a significant leap up from that by fighting 12 rounds and it will be interesting to see how will he performs under those conditions. Butler, 6’3″ 250 lbs, is known for having good power, and was reported to have knocked Vitali Klitschko down in sparring in 2005, while Vitali was training for his bout with Hasim Rahman.
Butler’s string of knockouts of his early competition would seem to suggest that his power is for real, though he’s yet to prove that against major fighters like Chambers. Obviously, it would seem that if Butler has any chance at all to win, he’ll have to hope that he can stop Chambers with something early on in the fight, a time when Butler usually scores his knockouts. If he can bum rush Chambers, get him covering up on the ropes as he often does in fights, Butler may get lucky and take him out with a flurry of shots to the head. Minus that, I see Butler losing by a lopsided decision or perhaps getting stopped late in the fight when he runs out of gas.