By Nate Anderson: Former WBO heavyweight champion Lamon Brewster (35-4, 30 KOs) defeated Michael Sprott (31-13, 16 KOs) by an easy eight-round unanimous decision on Saturday night at the Ostseehalle, Kiel, in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. The final judges’ scores were 78-73, 78-73 and 79-73. Sprott, 34, thinking safety first and committed solely on trying to survive rather than attempting to win, jabbed frequently and moved nearly nonstop to keep from getting taken out by the powerful Brewster.
In the end, Sprott succeeded in not getting knocked out, be he ended up losing just the same. Brewster did have his moments in spite of Sprott’s defensive fight, catching up to him at the end of the 3rd round and knocking him down with a big left hook to the head. Luckily for Sprott, the knockdown came at the end of the round which saved him from getting knocked out.
Sprott would continue to jab and move fir the next five rounds until the 8th, when he briefly opened up with a few meaningless left hands. With Brewster’s granite chin, there was little chance that Sprott could get lucky and score a miracle knockout. For that to happen, he would have to pound Brewster unceasingly from the 1st round until the 8th, and frankly, I don’t think Sprott’s chin could hold up for more than a round or two of getting hit with big shots from Brewster if he were to have elected to try and knock him out from the start of the fight.
Brewster, 35, stalked Sprott around the ring, landing power shots when he could catch up to him. It wasn’t easy because Sprott had a good jab, and his movement was constant as he skirted around the edges of the ring to try and avoid trouble. Brewster is generally good at cutting off the ring, but he seemed reluctant to go to the levels needed to make Sprott stop and fight.
Instead, Brewster mostly found himself in a jab war with Sprott and could only occasionally catch up to him to land some hard shots. In the opening round, Brewster landed a few nice body shots in the closing minute of the round, but not much more than that. Sprott, for his part, only threw a few token right hands in between his numerous jabs.
Brewster’s ring rush began to show in the 2nd, as he looked slow and slightly lethargic as he stalked Sprott around the ring in the early part of the fight. Brewster showed that an excellent jab, piercing threw Sprott’s guard and hitting him hard just as often as Sprott would hit him with jabs. When the fight was signed, the last thing I thought it would come to was a jabbing contest, but for the most part, that’s what ended up happening.
After largely throwing little more than jabs in the 3rd round, Brewster suddenly pounced on an unsuspecting Sprott in the last seconds of the round and lurching forward and landing a right-left combination that hurt Sprott, sending him down at the end of the round.
Unfortunately, Brewster wasn’t able to add to the knockdown as the time ran out in the round. In the 4th, it came down to a matchup between Brewster’s power shots and Sprott’s jabs, and as you would guess, Brewster easily came out on top.
I had hoped that Sprott would try and make a fight of it at some point, because after all this was a make or break fight for him. However, in the 5th round, Sprott began to move even more, trying to keep away from Brewster’s big power shots.
The fight was now almost unwatchable as Sprott looked for the most part like a reluctant sparring partner rather than an opponent. Brewster continued to have to settle for a power shot here and there, landing whenever he could catch up to Sprott and tag him with a big shot or two.
In the 6th and 7th, Brewster looked resigned to the fact that he wasn’t going to be able to knock Sprott out, and so he seemed to lessen his pace and start boxing more using his jab. In the 8th, Sprott took the fight to Brewster for a brief period in the round, hitting him with some good left hands and looking as if he was going to try and take him out. However, Sprott almost immediately went into shut down mode, turning back into his former fleeing self and spending the last part of the round being evasive as Brewster continued attacking him.
Overall, it was a good win for Brewster, who is trying to get his career back in order after suffering an eye injury in his title losing bout to Serguei Lyakhovich in April 2006, Brewster would take a year off letting his eye heal from surgery.
Now, two years later, Brewster is presently ranked number #11 in the WBA and if he can continue winning for the next year or so, he may get another title fight chance. With his big power, he would likely give WBA champion Ruslan Chagaev problems.