David Haye – Can Monte Barrett Break Haye’s Glass Jaw?

By Boxing News - 10/23/2008 - Comments

haye3445517.jpgBy Dan Ambrose: Heavyweight David Haye (21-1, 20 KOs) is on an express trip heading for a fight with IBF/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko in early 2009. Before doing so, Haye is going to cut his teeth on journeyman Monte Barrett, a fighter that Haye is hoping he can beat easily and impressive enough to give him a shot in the arm with boxing fans, to try and give him some much-needed credibility to his heavyweight career. Haye, already a former WBA, WBC and WBO cruiserweight champion, is trying to duplicate those efforts in the heavyweight division.

However, in this case, Haye isn’t looking to work his way up slowly to build to that level, and is thinking that he can skip all that and move straight to the top with only a minor fight against Barrett before that. It’s perhaps not the smartest thing that Haye could be doing, because he could end up looking stupid, especially if Barrett ends up taking him out in the early rounds of the fight. Haye had previously bragged long hard, saying that he would be facing a top heavyweight with a big name. As far as a top heavyweight goes, Barrett, ranked # 6th in the WBO, partially fits the bill. However, he’s much less the fighter than I originally expected from Haye when he initially started making pronouncements about wanting to fight a top heavyweight in the division, someone that he could get a lot of attention from the fans for fighting.

Barrett is good, but he’s lost against the top heavyweights like Wladimir Klitschko, Hasim Rahman, and Nikolay Valuev. With the way that Haye was talking, I expected no less than a fighter of Chris Arreola, Alexander Dimitrenko or a Hasim Rahman as his next opponent. However, I can understand him not wanting to fight them, because he’d fool if he did. Those guys are a lot bigger, punch much harder and are truly a level above all the previous opponents that Haye has fought his entire career.

If he were to hit them, and then they didn’t end up quickly folding like most of his opponents during his career, Haye would have a fight on his hands and might end up folding like he did against Carl Thompson in his 5th round TKO loss to him in 2004. Barrett, however, has good power, if not really size or chin, and if he can put his hands on Haye, he’ll stop him just as Thompson did. Haye’s chin is a major question mark for him, and at this point he probably would have been better off moving at a more incremental pace in seeking the heavyweight title.

Obviously, Haye saw fights of Wladimir Klitschko, in particular his knockout losses to Lamon Brewster, Ross Puritty and Corrie Sanders, and probably figured that he would have at least a puncher’s chance at stopping Klitschko before he got to his own chin. However, Haye probably missed the fact that Klitschko usually is only knocked out after he’s given his opponent a furious beating, with the exception of Sanders, and it’s a rare opponent that can take the kind of heat that Wladimir brings into his fights. Haye, I hate to say, probably couldn’t stand up to Wladimir’s shots for more than a round, at best.

And that brings me to Barrett, who has pretty good pop in his shots as well. I think Haye may be really overlooking Barrett, thinking that he’s a soft touch because of his multiple losses to the top heavyweights. It’s true, Barrett has beaten by the larger heavyweights, but he still has good power and if he can last long enough to hit Haye one or two times on his glass chin, that’s all that it may take to drop the British mouth.



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