By Dave Lahr: WBC heavyweight champion Vitali Klitschko has turned into an arm puncher recently as he’s aged to the point where he’s now too slow to land the few power shots he throws in his fights. Vitali, just so he can land, throws almost exclusively arm punches in his fights. This was the case in the Kevin Johnson, Alberto Sosnowski and Chris Arreola bouts. Vitali is losing more and more hand speed from fight to fight. This is good news for Briggs, because all he’ll have to worry about is Vitali’s pesky arm shots and that won’t be enough to slow Briggs down from attacking with his own big shots.

If there’s going to be a knockout in this fight, and I believe there will be, it’s going to be coming from Briggs and not the arm puncher Vitali. It’s sad to see how Vitali has been reduced to throwing arm punches just to land anything. But I suppose once you lose one thing in your body, you kind of have to fall back on other things. It’s a like a sprinter after he can no longer run. He has to walk like all of us.

Vitali’s hand speed is gone, and now that he’s just throwing arm punches, he’s going to be a sitting duck. You think it’s an accident that Vitali is going after weaker and weaker opposition? It’s not. The guy has lost something and taking on seemingly beatable fighters is a way to keep things going in a positive direction. Unfortunately, Vitali picked the wrong fighter in Briggs, because he still has more than enough left in the tank to get Vitali out of there.

Think of Briggs as an old abandoned rocket ship that people think can’t travel in space anymore. Briggs is going to show the world that he does have a little bit left in the tank, enough to take the arm-punching Vitali out with a single shot to the head between the 1st and the 6th round.

If Briggs doesn’t knock Vitali out by the 6th, Briggs’ goose is probably cooked, because Vitali will then arm punch him into submission. Briggs would be too tired to put up much of a fight in the 2nd half of the bout. But I see him getting to Vitali well before that and taking him out.