Calzaghe: Is He Tarnishing His Legacy By Avoiding Pavlik?

By Dan Ambrose: This is a question that has many boxing fans and writers wondering about since undefeated super middleweight Joe Calzaghe decided upon fighting what many people consider to be a faded Roy Jones Jr. rather than a young, 26-year-old undefeated middleweight Kelly Pavlik. Although Calzaghe has made his reasoning pretty clear for deciding not to fight Pavlik – “he’s not ready…he hasn’t proven himself…he turned me down previous…etc” -it doesn’t seem to be making much sense to many people and it’s not pacifying a lot of non-English boxing fans, who see it as something other than what Calzaghe is saying.

It’s strange, though, for Calzaghe has always been a fighter that I personally have considered brave, taking on the toughest super middleweights in the division like Mikkel Kessler and Jeff Lacy. However, the list runs short after those two fighters, and there’s still interest in my part, and other boxing fans, to see whether Calzaghe could prove how good he is by facing a fighter smaller than himself in Pavlik, a middleweight, and who appears to be equally as good. Especially after Calzaghe’s last fight, a 12-round split decision over a 43 year-old American fighter Bernard Hopkins, who not only came close to beating Calzaghe but also knocked him down in the process.

In light of that fight, there are a lot of questions about how good Calzaghe is and ever was. That’s becoming even more a question after watching Jeff Lacy, perhaps the second best win of Calzaghe’s career, struggle to defeat C-class opposition like Epifanio Mendoza or decent B-level fighters like Peter Manfredo Jr. and Vitali Tsypko. That effectively leaves Calzaghe with only one real good win in his career, a 12-round close decision over Kessler. That’s a good victory, but hardly the stuff of legend, considering that Kessler hasn’t fought any real big-name fighters in his career like Hopkins, Jermain Taylor, Pavlik, Chad Dawson or Antonio Tarver.

Forget about Calzaghe’s win over Chris Eubank that came at the end of Eubank’s career and he had almost nothing left at that stage in the game. Even then, he stunned Calzaghe at the end of the fight and had him on queer street for a moment. Seeing that Calzaghe’s entire career has been essentially barren of real big-name opponents and without a career-defining fight, he almost has to fight Pavlik or risk retiring with a less than impressive legacy in my view and the view of many other people.

Though his loving boxing fans will deny this, the more objective members of the sport like myself will see it quite differently. Calzaghe not only has to fight Pavlik in order to guarantee leaving his legacy untarnished, he has almost has to. Pavlik is like an unfinished paper for a schoolboy, and unless it gets done, the grade won’t be an ‘A’ for the child. You can ignore the paper, but then the grade certainly won’t measure up to other top students in the class.

With Calzaghe, we’re comparing to him top fighters like Nigel Benn, Herol Graham, Michael Watson and Chris Eubank. In other words, fighters that never backed away from a fight, and ones that always gave it their all in the sport. None of them retired until they were at the very end of their careers, having exhausted all of their abilities and gotten the most of their careers by facing the toughest opponent out there.

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