Will Beating Jones Prove Calzaghe’s Greatness?

By Dan Ambrose: I don’t know about any of you, but I thought the sole reason that Joe Calzaghe was fighting Roy Jones Jr., rather than Kelly Pavlik, was so that he could get the biggest payday possible while on the way out the door in the sport. Did I miss something? If anyone thinks for a second that a win over Jones, who is 39, almost 40 and hasn’t looked good in the ring in ages, will prove anything other than the fact that Calzaghe is good enough to beat a faded Jones, then I they need a wakeup call.

Don’t get me wrong, Jones was a great fighter in his day, much better probably than Calzaghe can ever hope to be, but he’s aged a little quicker than Calzaghe, probably due to all the hard fights that Jones has had over the years and he’s not nearly at the level he was years ago. A win is a win, and Calzaghe will always have the ‘W’ next to his name in his record book for Jones, if he beats him, but where’s the victory in beating him at this stage? In a way, it reminds me a lot of Oscar De La Hoya’s fight against Manny Pacquiao. Sure, De La Hoya will probably win, and get paid well in the process, but he won’t likely win much of any respect from fans for having beaten such a small fighter like Pacquiao.

I don’t know what’s gotten into Calzaghe’s head, because for me, if I was in his situation, I couldn’t keep a straight face if I had to be involved with press conferences in which I had to answer questions about my fight with Jones. I’d be too embarrassed. The fight made sense six years ago when Jones was still fighting well, but not now. Rather than mentioning things like greatness and legacies, Calzaghe should instead be saying how nice it’ll be to get a good paycheck from the Jones bout.

Anything other than that, I personally can’t stomach because it seems disingenuous. No one in their right mind thinks that Jones has a ghost of a chance at beating Calzaghe, and the whole thing seems as if it’s been choreographed ahead of time like a play. Aside from Jones landing a punch or two in the fight, he’s probably going to spend the better part of the bout glued to the ropes, trying to cover up from all the punches that are being rained in on him from every angle by Calzaghe.

If Jones is really lucky, he might get through the fight without being knocked out, but I’m certainly not counting on that happening. Calzaghe isn’t the biggest puncher around, to be sure, but he still averages close to 1000 punches thrown per 12-round fight and that’s an awful lot of punches for Jones to try and block without getting nailed and put down. No matter how you look at it, the fight has mismatch written all over it, and there’s little to be gained, at least for Calzaghe’s sake.

Jones has a chance, a small one, of scoring a lucky knockout but Calzaghe would have to be really sloppy to let that happen. More than likely, Calzaghe will attack Jones hard in every round, leading to Jones backing up to the ropes and covering up as best as he can for the duration of the round.

This process will be repeated round after round up until the fight is either stopped due to Jones going down or the final bell ringing at the end. In any event, Jones will lose, Calzaghe will get his precious victory and fans will have seen a terrible mismatch. In the end, all it will prove is that Calzaghe was good enough to defeat a fighter that left his best behind many years ago.

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