By Ryan Burton

The last few years of former super middleweight champion Andre Ward's career have been filled with long stretches of inactivity. His career has been plagued by injuries and disputes with his former promoter which caused his career to stall.

The Super Six tournament winner has only fought three times since his knockout victory over Chad Dawson on September 8th, 2012. The periods of inactivity will officially come to a halt in 2016 as the Oakland native is in line to fight at least three times in a calendar year for the first time since 2009.

Ward's contract was bought out by Roc Nation Sports in 2015 and he will make his third ring appearance under their banner on Saturday night at the Oracle Arena in Oakland, Calif. in a HBO televised bout against Alexander Brand (25-1).

Ward started off his 2016 campaign with a dominant victory over Sullivan Barrera in March and insisted that he get another fight under his belt before his November 19th mega-fight against WBA/WBO/IBF light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev. Now Alexander Brand is the only obstacle standing in the way of the Ward-Kovalev showdown that fans have been salivating over.

Ward (29-0) said that this camp has been a lot different than previous camps where he had to spend several weeks shaking off ring rust before getting into a groove and expects to put on a great performance Saturday night.

"I was a lot sharper, a lot quicker. Normally with a layoff you have to knock the rust off.  Typically you have to shake off the rust and then get sharp but this time we just came straight in and 2-3 weeks in camp we were like damn we are looking good so we had to pull back a little bit.  We got way over 150 rounds, like 150-160 rounds in. I am feeling good, real good," Ward told BoxingScene.com.

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