EDDIE CHAMBERS W12 (maj.) ALEXANDER DIMITRENKO

Finally, Eddie Chambers lived up to his potential, fighting aggressively and with a consistency he hasn’t always shown in the past to defeat the towering Alexander Dimitrenko in their World Boxing Organisation heavyweight championship eliminator in Hamburg on Saturday.

This was the best Chambers has ever looked. Defeated by Alexander Povetkin on a previous visit to Germany, disappointingly negative against Samuel Peter in his last fight, Chambers gave his best-ever display as he dominated most of the 12 rounds against the unbeaten Ukrainian.

He seemed to hurt Dimitrenko a number of times and dropped him in the 10th, while the Ukrainian boxer was given a standing eight count in confusing circumstances in the seventh.

It was little short of amazing, then, that British judge Paul Thomas saw this as a draw with a score of 113-113, an assessment booed by the German crowd. Mercifully, judges from the U.S. and Spain got it right with scores of 117-109 and 115-111 in favour of Chambers.

In the bout with Povetkin, Chambers started well but let a winnable fight drift away from him. This time he started well and refused to allow himself to lapse into lethargy, although there were several rounds when Dimitrenko was able to make a bit of a rally.

Overall, though, Chambers simply looked a different class of fighter to his opponent. He backed up Dimitrenko, raked him with combinations and often outjabbed the taller man.

Dimitrenko, I thought, fought well enough to beat the Chambers we have seen in some of his past fights. Unfortunately for the Ukrainian boxer, however, Chambers was on a new level in this fight, mentally strong and physically in tiptop condition at a little over 208 pounds — his lightest weight in six years and 11 pounds less than when he lost to Povetkin.

Chambers showed that size isn’t everything in a heavyweight fight, that a smaller man with talent can beat a bigger one of inferior technique.

It was Chambers’s mental toughness that impressed me the most, though. He often seemed to be intimidating the bigger man, moving in with gloves up, peeling off a classy assortment of sharp, hurtful punches, grinning and shaking his head “no” when Dimitrenko fired back.

For a while, Dimitrenko was able to stay with Chambers, jabbing with him, letting the right hand go, triggering off some combinations of his own, and there was a certain back-and-forth flow to the contest, with the fighters slapping gloves at the end of the fifth in appreciation of each others’ efforts.

In the sixth, though, there was the first clear indication that Dimitrenko was starting to give way as he turned away after taking a left hook to the body and tried to claim a low blow, Chambers having been cautioned for an errant delivery in the previous round. This time, though, Chicago referee Geno Rodriguez merely motioned to Dimitrenko to continue boxing. It was, I thought, a telling moment, a sign that things were getting too tough for Dimitrenko’s liking.

Then, in the seventh, there was what seemed to me the big breakthrough for Chambers when he again hurt Dimitrenko with the left hook to the body. This time Dimitrenko looked on the verge of surrender, indicating he had been hit by a kidney punch. Referee Rodriguez would have been justified in stopping the fight, but instead he gave Dimitrenko an eight count. WBO rules do not allow a standing eight count, but I believe the referee was seeking to avoid a fiasco-type finish. The eight count let Dimitrenko know that his claim of being fouled had not been accepted and gave him time to make up his mind whether to quit or to continue. Dimitrenko fought on, a bit reluctantly, it seemed, but now Chambers had both physical and psychological control of the contest.

Dimitrenko seemed to be fighting his way back in the ninth, but Chambers had a massive round in the 10th when a big left hook sent Dimitrenko’s mouthpiece flying out and had him balancing on his right glove for an eight count. Somehow Dimitrenko got through the round and even fought back in the 11th, one of the few rounds in which Chambers reverted to an old habit of moving in and blocking punches while not throwing many of his own. Chambers closed out the fight in style, though, as he banged Dimitrenko around the ring in the last round, but the big Ukrainian gamely made it to the final bell.

I thought that this was one of the best performances overseas by a U.S. heavyweight in a long time, and if I’m not mistaken I believe that the appreciative crowd was chanting Chambers’s name at the end.

It was an exciting as well as a technically excellent performance, and Dimitrenko’s swollen visage attested to the sharpness of Chambers’s punching.

Despite the size difference the fight often had the look of a man against a boy as the so-called little heavyweight bullied the big fellow. Instead of coasting, Chambers largely kept the pressure on his opponent. He fought as if he was determined to make up for his disappointing display the last time he was in Germany: I would say he more than made up for it.