By William Mackay: Former WBO heavyweight champion Shannon Briggs may have gotten badly beaten in his 12 round landslide loss to WBC heavyweight champion Vitali Klitachko last Saturday night in Germany, but Briggs showed a ton of heart by staying in there and taking massive punishment for 12 rounds from Vitali without once going down in the fight. But Briggs never stopped attacking in the fight, and ended up throwing a respectable 316 punches in the route loss. That’s a decent number of punches for someone who was literally getting his head taken off all night long by the giant Klitschko.

In contrast, World Boxing Association (WBA) heavyweight champion David Haye (24-1, 22 KO’s) threw only a half that number in his narrow and controversial 12 round majority decision win over Nikolay Valuev last year. Haye threw only 143 punches in the Valuev fight, and spent most of the fight running around in wide circles in the ring without doing much of anything other than avoid action. I don’t know how a fighter can win a title throwing only 143 punches and being out-landed by Valuev the way that Haye was in that fight.

Briggs didn’t just stand and do nothing in the Klitschko fight. Obviously, he was attacking constantly to wind up with 316 punches thrown in the fight. Briggs was constantly trying to land. But the problem was he didn’t have the height and reach do make contact. At 6’4″, with the same reach as Vitali, Briggs was still unable to land his shots because of how long Vitali’s upper body is.

Vitali was able to bend backwards to keep Briggs from landing his shots. If the 6’4″ 260 pound Briggs couldn’t do anything against Vitali, then how can the even shorter and smaller 6’2″ 217 pound Haye do any better? Haye is even shorter than and smaller than the 6’3″ 223 pound Monte Barrett, who looked tiny in his fight against Wladimir Klitschko in the past. I think Haye doesn’t have a chance against Vitali. He’s too small, too timid and too passive to beat the big Ukrainian.