When a highly-touted fighter receives a comprehensive and humiliating drubbing like the one super-middleweight Lucian Bute absorbed at the hands of Carl Froch in May, the question always arises: Can he come back? Well, sometimes they do; sometimes they don?t. Floyd Patterson was knocked down seven times in the third round of his KO loss to Ingemar Johansson in 1959. A year later, Patterson knocked Johansson kicking in the fifth round to become the first heavyweight champion to regain his lost title. To go even farther in the ?way-back? machine: at the turn of the 20th century, featherweight ?Terrible? Terry McGovern was thought to be unbeatable before the unheralded Young Corbett III starched him in the second round of a title tilt. McGovern was never the same fighter after that debacle.
So, when Bute squared off on Saturday against Russian prospect Denis Grachev in the friendly hometown confines of the Bell Centre in Montreal, spectators wondered whether Lucian would rebound or regress. By scoring a unanimous decision over the previously undefeated Grachev, Bute did, indeed, rebound ? but not, perhaps, as impressively as he would have liked.
Despite his unblemished record, Grachev entered the contest as a 13-bout novice, with 8 KOs to his credit. His best win was his most recent ? a knockout of fellow prospect Ismael Sillakh. Bute, by contrast, had 31 bouts going in; and before Froch beat him, the Romanian-Canadian was considered the second-best super-middleweight in the world, after Andre Ward.
The pre-Froch Bute would most likely have gotten the inexperienced Grachev out of there about halfway through the bout. The post-Froch Bute had to dig deep to pull out the 12-round win, and Grachev had his foe in trouble more than a few times. So, the post-Froch Bute does seem somewhat diminished ? though hardly to the extent the post-Corbett III McGovern was more than 100 years ago.
With his hard-fought win, Bute picked up the NABF light-heavyweight belt ? a meaningless bauble, considering that his next fight is supposed to be a rematch with Froch, tentatively scheduled in March of the coming year. Presumably, that bout will be fought at 168 lbs, not 175.
Froch has a fight of his own coming up on November 17: a title defense against Yusuf Mack. After a series of tough battles stretching back to 2009, in which he faced the likes of Ward, Arthur Abraham, Mikkel Kessler and Andre Dirrell, the Mack bout represents a respite for Froch. Sporting a record of 31-4, with 17 KOs, Mack is a notch or two below Froch?s previous opponents. Tellingly, all four of Mack?s losses have come inside the distance. More tellingly, Mack will be coming down from light-heavy. The last time Mack fought at super-middle was five years ago, when he was flattened by Librado Andrade. Mack should ask Chad Dawson what it?s like to come down in weight to face an elite-level opponent, as Dawson disastrously did against Ward in September.
If Mack somehow beats Froch, it will be the upset of the year, if not the decade. Barring that, when Froch meets Bute again, the result will be another beatdown of Bute.
