By Scott Gilfoid: With appealing, crowd-pleasing fights in front of him against fighters like Chad Dawson, Carl Froch and Bernard Hopkins, you can probably expect for Joe Calzaghe to hang up the gloves in 2009 and retire from boxing rather than continuing on against dangerous fighters. It seems as if the victories over Mikkel Kessler and Hopkins has effectively put Calzaghe in the shut down mode, leaving him with little desire to continue fighting. Calzaghe’s bout against Roy Jones Jr. was more of a money fight than an actual legacy-building fight for Calzaghe, and was hardly an interesting fight or worthwhile one.
It’s too bad, really, because Calzaghe has so many important fights with which to carve his still questionable legacy. Though he’s practically worshiped in the UK, where fans could care less whom he fought for most of his career, it’s much less so elsewhere, especially in the U.S, where the boxing fans are a lot more analytical about fighter’s records.
That’s probably the case because many of us have seen so many fighters with badly inflated records only to have them exposed when they fight a quality opponent. Calzaghe, unfortunately, apart from his fight against Kessler, hasn’t helped himself by staying in Europe and fighting mostly European competition with questionable ability.
Knowing that he’s getting up there in age at 36, Calzaghe badly needd more than anything to prove that he can beat the best fighters in the world by stepping it up against top notch fighters like Dawson, Froch, Lucian Bute and Jean Pascal. Instead, we will likely be seeing the Jones fight as being Calzaghe’s last bout of his 15-year pro career.
I frankly don’t know how he can retire leaving those fighters still standing, especially Dawson, who is considered to be the best fighter in the light heavyweight division. That’s someone Calzaghe has to fight if he wants to bow out with a lot of respect.
Whereas Dawson has been setting the world on fire with wins over Glen Johnson, Antonio Tarver and Tomasz Adamek, we’ve had to settle for watching Calzaghe beat fighters like Jones and Jeff Lacy. I don’t count the fight against Hopkins, because I feel that Hopkins was given a bad deal and should have been awarded the decision over Calzaghe.
That’s an automatic do over, as far as I’m concerned. The victory left no one satisfied, leaving a lot of fans wondering what could have been if the judges’ have given Hopkins the victory instead of Calzaghe. And I could care less whether Calzaghe dislikes Hopkins, he needed to give him a rematch to prove to him and himself who the better fighter was. That probably won’t be happening.
I’d even settle for Calzaghe taking on Carl Froch, who I consider to be the top super middleweight in the division bar none, for Joe’s last fight. Granted, it wouldn’t be my number #1 choice of an opponent, but given that or nothing, I’d like to see this fight. I think Froch would win, which is probably Calzaghe won’t be fighting him.
In other words, Froch is too dangerous for him to take on, as the fight would be messy, grueling battle with Calzaghe taking a lot of huge shots from the powerful Froch and eventually losing to him. I do think that if Calzaghe retires now, his legacy will suffer badly for it, because there’s too many questions that need to be answered about his ability, and given his lack of quality opponents through much of his career, it’s important that he ends on a strong note by taking on Froch, Dawson, Bute and Pascal before retiring.
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