By William Mackay: Heavyweight Lamon Brewster (33-4, 29 KOs) will be making his comeback on Saturday night against Danny Batchelder (25-5-1, 12 KOs) in a scheduled 12-round bout for the vacant NABA heavyweight title at the Cincinnati Gardens, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Brewster, now 35, a former World Boxing Organization heavyweight champion, hasn’t seen action in over a year since losing by a sixth round stoppage to IBF heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko. In that fight, Brewster looked hardly the same fighter he had been in the past. Gone was his brawling style and in its place was a more passive, risk-adverse style of fighting as if Brewster was trying to avoid contact altogether.

There would be no problem with this style of fighting if Brewster was using a jab and foot movement to get in position to land shots against the 6’6″ Klitschko. However, Brewster did little punching and seemed unable to pull the trigger. His new trainer Buddy McGirt had been brought in to teach him how to avoid taking so much punishment, something that had been a factor in Brewster experiencing a detached retina of his left eye while losing his WBO world title to challenger Serguei Lyakhovich in April 2006.

Following that injury, Brewster took 15 months off from boxing and had surgery performed on his injured eye to repair the problem. Naturally, after an injury as serious as a detached retina, one would think that a fighter with a brawling style like Brewster has been known for would be wanting to take things slow for awhile and perhaps fight several tune-up bouts to get used to contact once again before taking on a top fighter.

However, Brewster, without any tune-up, went straight into a title bout against IBF champion Klitschko. In hindsight, I imagine he wished he would have had a few fights under his belt so he could get his boxing skills back in order before taking on a fighter as red-hot as Wladimir. He didn’t. As things turned out, Brewster looked badly rusty, lacking aggression and fighting completely different than he has in the past.

His new trainer, defensive guru Buddy McGirt seemed to have rubbed off on him with a few defensive wrinkles he showed in the fight, such as moving his head more and trying to twist his torso to avoid punches. Brewster had never fought like in the past, and would instead mostly block punches with his face. However, the new defensive skills that Brewster learned had a drawback, namely they came at the expense of his offense which now was basically nonexistent.

After the loss the Klitschko, Brewster took another year off from boxing and appears to be coming back with a newfound joy for boxing. He says that he will be more aggressive, more active and will clean up the heavyweight division. Let’s hope so, because if he fights the way he did against Wladimir in his last a year ago, Brewster will likely get beat by Batchelder on Saturday night.

Other than his eye, which he says has healed up completely, physically he’s the same fighter he always was, but the problem is whether he’ll be able to mentally bring himself back to the way he used to fight – in other words, an all out brawling style of fighting. Frankly, it’s too late in the game to try and make a defensive artist out of Brewster, because he’s too old at 35 to change his style, and he already was finding success with his old style.

If it’s not broke, why fix it? The only real adjustment that Brewster needed, as far as I could see, was he needed to learn how to attack hard from the beginning of his fights and try to put his punches together a little more. He’s always fought in short bursts and would save these bursts until late in the fight, long after he’d already absorbed a lot of punishment.