Grady Brewer Prepping For One Last Curtain Call
By Lyle Fitzsimmons
“Hey… didn’t you used to be Grady Brewer?!?”
You’ll have to forgive a perturbed 37-year-old if he no longer laughs at that opening line.
“Yeah, it’s frustrating, disappointing, irritating. All those things,” said Brewer, the season two champion of ESPN’s ‘The Contender,’ who’s spent much of the two years since his dramatic win in Los Angeles watching fellow series alumni surge past him on the boxing significance ladder.
“I could come up with about 1,000 words to describe how it feels. These guys are not better than me. They may be younger than I am, but they aren’t doing anything that I couldn’t be doing, and doing even better. It’s been injuries that have held me back, not a lack of talent.”
A winner over Steve Forbes in the second season finale on Sept. 26, 2006, Brewer was on the shelf with various maladies for the subsequent 717 days before finally re-emerging two Fridays ago with a third-round stoppage of Brandon Wooten in Lawton, Okla.
Among the issues keeping him sidelined were chronic knee and shoulder pain that prompted a series of arthroscopic surgeries, as well as a more-intensive cartilage replacement procedure.
And the blows to the resolve have been frequent as well.
First-season Contender champion Sergio Mora has won and lost a 154-pound world title since appearing on the show, while his runner-up, Peter Manfredo Jr., was stopped in three rounds in a failed bid for the WBO super middleweight crown in 2007.
Third-place finisher Alfonso Gomez also got a title shot, falling in five rounds to Miguel Cotto in the then-unbeaten Puerto Rican’s final title defense before a summertime loss to Antonio Margarito.
Even second-season runner-up Forbes, whom Brewer beat by split decision, was rewarded with a role as Oscar De La Hoya’s foil in the Golden Boy’s May 3 return, which he’s since parlayed into a date with incumbent Andre Berto for the WBC welterweight belt on Sept. 27 in Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, Brewer’s sat and waited.
“It’s real tough. Real, real, real tough. But it makes me want it even more,” Brewer said.
“I beat Forbes and then he gets De La Hoya and now Berto. It’s amazing how much these guys have advanced while I’ve been sitting back and trying to recover from this thing or that thing. But you just remind yourself that God is making all this happen for a reason.”
A Lawton native and father of five who still holds a job at a local Goodyear tire facility, Brewer was among the least likely candidates for TV success after an early career that saw him lose 11 times in 29 fights, including meetings with future stars Kelly Pavlik (TKO 2) and Jermain Taylor (UD 8).
He dropped three of four bouts heading into the series and was contemplating retirement in early 2006, but got a confidence boost after an early episode win over Vinroy Barrett, which was followed by defeats of Michael Stewart and Norberto Bravo over the subsequent three weeks.
The Forbes finale came seven months later and brought with it a winner’s purse of $500,000.
“A lot of my early fights that I took on short notice really destroyed my record,” Brewer said. “I was facing guys like Taylor and Manfredo when I wasn’t really ready with my cardio work. They’d call me because they knew I’d take the fights, but I didn’t have time to train.
“I would go out and compete evenly with them and a lot of times outperform them, but I didn’t have the conditioning built up and I couldn’t take it to the end of the fight. I’d wear down and they’d either outpoint me or I’d get stopped. I was right there, but I just needed a break.”
The return to the ring against Wooten marked step one of what he hopes will be a successful second act, which continues Nov. 13 as part of a Contender reunion event in Providence, R.I.
There, Brewer will face second-season semifinalist Cornelius Bundrage in the final preliminary bout beneath a main event featuring Manfredo and another season-one alumnus, Sakio Bika.
The Brewer-Bundrage winner could advance to a title-elimination bout at 154 pounds.
And in the mean time, on Oct. 15, Brewer will meet with his supervisors at Goodyear one last time to decide whether he wants to remain on the regular staff there or go all-in in the ring.
Decisions, decisions.
“It’s definitely a make-or-break fight for me,” Brewer said. “There’s no doubt that will be an extra source of pressure, but, just like anything else, you have to block it out. I can’t think about the opportunity or else it’ll take away from my fight. I’ve done it all my life. This is just another example.
“When I turned pro in 1998, my goal was to get to the top and become a world champion and that hasn’t changed. Even when I was losing fights, I always thought I could compete if I had the same chances. And now is my opportunity to prove that.”