By Scott Gilfoid: David Haye (21-1, 20 KOs) has reportedly givin up his WBC cruiserweight championship belt, and asking the WBC to rate him in the WBC heavyweight division. However, he still has yet to give up his other two cruiserweight belts, the WBA and WBO. One can imagine that Haye, 27 will shortly be giving up those belts as well as he moves forward with his hopes of winning a heavyweight title in the near future. As for Haye’s WBC cruiserweight title, it will be fought over by Rudolf Kraj and Giacobbe Fragomeni. The latter fighter is no stranger to Haye, having fought a life and death battle with him in November 2006, in which Haye, who was bloodied and hit often, eventually prevailed with a 9th round stoppage.

Since letting his plans known that he wants to move up to cruiserweight, Haye has not been shy about wanting to take on the best in the division. Unlike most fighters, Haye has no interest in taking things slow and moving up in small increments the way that it’s normally done in the boxing world. Almost immediately, Haye called out IBF/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko , asking him to fight him. After getting not getting a positive response from Klitschko, Haye recently confronted him at a charity press conference in April, getting face to face with Klitschko and calling him out. Klitschko looked both startled and afraid, as if he wasn’t sure if Haye was going to reach out and clock him with one of his big trademark right hands.

Despite his bold challenge, Haye was unable to get Klitschko to agree to a fight, instead being told to “get in line.” However, Haye’s courage of challenging Klitschko, as well as his desire not to waste time fighting lower level opponents, seems to have increased his reputation in the boxing world. Most fans are pretty much sick of seeing fighters afraid to fight other good opponents, and don’t care for the general risk adverse nature of most of the champions. In that respect, Haye is a whole different breed from what we’ve been seeing in the past few years.

Even Klitschko, despite being the champion, seems to be avoiding fighters like the rest of them as he recently has shown by skipping over his IBF mandatory Alexander Povetkin to fight Tony Thompson, his WBO mandatory, someone who is arguably the weaker fighter than Povetkin. It doesn’t appear that Klitschko will fight Haye, but one would hope that Haye can move up in the division quickly and get a title or two, because the division really needs him as a champion to bring some excitement to it.

In his last fight, Haye destroyed WBO cruiserweight champion Enzo Maccarinelli in a 2nd round TKO in March 2008. The fight was thought to be a very competitive match-up going into the bout. However, Haye did what he often does, by moving forward and throwing huge bombs that quickly got Maccarinelli in trouble. Though Enzo made it though the 1st round, he took some tremendous shots and looked badly over his head against Haye. In the 2nd round, Haye almost immediately dropped Enzo with huge right hand. The fight was stopped shortly after with Haye blasting Enzo out of there with monstrous shots to the head.