By Dan Ambrose: I don’t know what happened to former IBF super middleweight champion Lucian Bute (31-1, 24 KO’s) but he sure looked damaged from his previous fight to Carl Froch in struggling to a 12 round decision victory over Denis Grachev (12-1-1, 8 KO’s) at the Bell Centre, in Montreal, Canada.

The judges scored it 115-113, 118-110 and 116-112. You have to wonder which fight the judges who scored it 118-110 for Bute was watching. The fight was much closer than that.

Grachev was able to land effectively each time Bute would retreat to the ropes in the fight, and unfortunately for Bute that was quite frequent. Bute had been told to stay off the ropes before the fight, and was reminded frequently in between rounds tonight. But Bute came making the same mistake over and over again by falling back to the ropes and trying to make a stand there. Bute did have the better speed and landed the nicer punches when he had the action on the outside. But he would then mess things up by going back to the ropes and allowing Grachev to land his own big shots.

In the 12th, it looked like Bute had Grachev a little hurt as he opened up on him with hard shots, bouncing them off of Grachev’s chin one after another. Grachev took the shots but he didn’t look happy.

Bute came into the fight expected to easily beat the slower and much less experienced Grachev. However, the fight turned out to be pretty competitive with Bute taking punishment along the ropes during most every round of the fight. Bute did look good in the 12th round when he finally opened up for the first time with his offense and stopped fighting with so much cautiousness. But by then the fight was already about finished and he’d given away a lot of rounds to the Russian Grachev.

The southpaw Bute looked like he was using the fight to rehearse a defensive strategy for his next fight against Carl Froch for early next year, as Bute spent much of the time moving around the ring and not throwing punches. That was the whole problem. He wasn’t throwing enough shots, and and letting Grachev stay in the fight when Bute could have easily pulled away if he had throw shots.

The win puts Bute in position to face Carl Froch again in a rematch in early 2013. Froch has to do his part in making the fight by defeating Yusaf Mack this month on November 17th in Nottingham, England.

Bute went from being a really good fighter to looking like a mediocre guy that’s lost a few steps since his loss to Froch. He doesn’t look like the same fighter he once was.