By Erik Schmidt: Former World Boxing Organization heavyweight champion Lamon Brewster (35-4, 30 KO´s) will be making his fourth bout on his comeback trail against Nigerian Gbenga Oloukun (16-1, 10 KOs) on August 29th at the König Palast, Krefeld, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany. Brewster, 36, is trying to turn his career around and get back into title contention. He’ll be fighting on the undercard of the Marco Huck vs. Victor Emilio Ramirez WBO cruiserweight title bout.

Brewster is currently ranked number #10 in the WBO, but he’s going to have to face stiffer competition than Oloukun if he wants to move up quicker. At this pace, it would be years before Brewster would be in position to fight for the title against WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko.

I seriously doubt that Wladimir will elect to fight Brewster unless he’s his mandatory challenger, and that’s not because Klitschko has much to fear from Brewster. Klitschko easily defeated Brewster by a 6th round stoppage two years ago in July 2007, dominating Brewster with jabs for most of the fight.

Eventually, Brewster retired on his stool following the 6th round with the advice from his trainer. Previously, Brewster stopped Klitschko in the 5th round five years ago in April 2004 to win the WBO title. However, a lot of time has passed since then and Brewster took a lot of punishment in subsequent fights against Kali Meehan and Luan Krasniqi.

Although Brewster did successfully defend his WBO title three times, he took a real pounding in the process. In April 2006, Brewster lost his WBO title in a 12 round decision loss to Sergey Lyakhovich. Brewster injured his left eye in the bout, which later required surgery to repair a detached retina. Brewster then took a year off to recover from the injury.

And with his first fight back 15 months later, Brewster made the mistake of fighting Wladimir Klitschko in a rematch. In hindsight, it was probably a bad move on Brewster’s part to fight Klitschko without a tune-up, but he didn’t want to miss the chance and lose out on a nice payday, so he took the fight anyway.

Brewster didn’t show any of the fire and tenacity that he was known for having prior to the eye injury and fought mostly in a passive manner against Klitschko. The result was that Brewster was completely dominated and rarely laid a glove on the 6’6″ Klitschko.

Brewster has looked good since then, beating Danny Batchelder and Michael Sprott in the past year. Brewster is now fighting out of Germany where he’s likely to have more opportunities for good paydays than he might otherwise have had if he had stayed in the U.S. However, it’s going to be a long road to get back into a title shot against Klitschko, and even when Brewster does get there, the chances are slim that he’ll be able to contend against him. In the 2004 fight, Brewster was knocked down by Wladimir in the 4th and on the verge of being knocked out. However, Klitschko punched himself out in the process and was taken out in the next round.