Should Vitali Klitschko Face Haye First Rather Than Wladimir?

By Boxing News - 11/16/2008 - Comments

By Jim Dower: With tonight’s 5th round stoppage victory by David Haye over journeyman Monte Barrett, should Vitali Klitschko be Haye’s next opponent rather than Wladimir? At 37, Vitali isn’t going to be around boxing for much longer, and he has no credible opponents on the horizon other than his number #1 challenger to his WBC crown, Juan Carlos Gomez, who most boxing fans could care less about seeing Vitali fight.

At best, Vitali may be able to stick around the sport for a year without once again suffering on type of debilitating injury or another, thus wiping out another six months to a year while he tries to recover. For that reason, I think that Wladimir should step aside and give Haye to Vitali as a kind of an offering to him because of his limited time left. To be sure, Wladimir could take the fight and hog the glory, but in doing so he’ll be giving Vitali very limited options due to his increasing age.

While Vitali has stated that he’s hopeful that Lennox Lewis will come out of retirement to give him a long awaited rematch, I don’t see that happening in a million years time. Lewis won’t be coming back, and Vitali will be waiting around for nothing hoping that he comes back.

Aside from that, there’s only WBA heavyweight champion Nikolay Valuev for Vitali to fight, but that fight likely won’t be happening anytime soon, if ever, because Valuev is taking on Evander Holyfield in his next fight, and after that, he’ll probably be facing Ruslan Chagaev, which would push back any potential fight with Vitali until the end of 2009, possibly early 2010.

That’s a little too long for a fighter like Vitali to wait, if you ask me, because he’s like fine wine and it’s ready to be sampled now rather than waiting and losing it from spoilage or evaporation. This is why I feel that Wladimir should do the honorable thing and feed Haye to Vitali, and let the fans see what happens.

If Haye is really all that, then he should be able to easily beat Vitali. If he’s not, then well, he can always go back down to the cruiserweight division and continue to beat up on over-matched guys like Enzo Maccarinelli. Haye has plenty of time to still fight, at 28, but Vitali clearly doesn’t. This is why my hope is that Wladimir steps aside and feeds Haye to Vitali. It should be an interesting fight while it lasts.



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