Bute's Coach: Pascal in Very Tough, Kovalev Superior To Golovkin

By Luke Furman

Howard Grant, trainer for former champion Lucian Bute, is expected a very, very tough fight for Jean Pascal, who faces IBF/WBA/WBO light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev (28-0-1, 25 KOs) on January 30th in Montreal.

Pascal (30-3-1, 17 KO) faced Kovalev in March of last year, in what was a very exciting contest with the champion getting a stoppage win in eight rounds.

Following the loss, The Canadian star had a lackluster effort against Yunieski Gonzalez in Las Vegas. He won a controversial ten round decision in a contest where some ringside observers scored the bout for Gonzalez.

A few months after that fight, Pascal hired the services of Hall of Fame trainer Freddie Roach.

"It is a very, very tough fight for Jean Pascal. In my opinion, Kovalev is one of the best boxers in the world, superior to [Gennady] Golovkin. I'm saying this because not only is he a puncher, but he also knows how to box. In his fight against Bernard Hopkins - he selected his moments to attack. And Hopkins is a master in the art of drawing his opponents into his traps to hit them with his head and elbows, but Kovalev never took the bait. That impressed me a lot," Grant told the Canadian Press.

"That said, you can never count Jean out. He has a lot of guts."

Grant is also not sure if Pascal's decision to use Roach will help him. He feels the training camp is too short. Pascal was previously trained by top Canadian coach Marc Ramsey.

"I honestly think that his training camp is too short at six weeks. I trained Lucian for three months before his fight against [Andrea] Di Luisa and for [James] DeGale we had a 10-week training camp. We spent a lot of time together. We spent lot of time on our strategy. If Jean and Freddie were able to create a chemistry from their first meeting, then it's so much the better. It will be interesting to see," Grant said.

"The main difference with me, is that my full attention was turned to Lucian. With Freddie, there is [Manny] Pacquiao, [Miguel] Cotto... He has them all. Pascal is just one [fighter] among many others [who Roach trains]."

Luke Furman covers boxing for bokser.org.