By Chris Williams: You know, after watching Joe Calzaghe ride out on the sunset this week calling it quits to his boxing career rather than continuing on against the one big challenge that he had on his plate (Chad Dawson), I wonder if maybe Calzaghe might have been perhaps afraid to fight him and thought it might be best to retire rather than taking a hard fight that could very well end up with him losing to Chad. There’s no shame in retiring or being reluctant to face an opponent.
Heck, fighters have been doing it for ages, haven’t they? My problem with Calzaghe, though, is that he claimed to have “achieved everything he wanted to achieve and had no other goals to go for.” If that’s the case, then Calzaghe seems to have set a low bar to measure his achievements, because as far as I can tell, he missed fighting Dawson – the biggest and the best fighter in the light heavyweight division too many people.
How Calzaghe could overlook Dawson is beyond me, and leaves me wondering about his motives for retiring. Who knows, maybe Calzaghe believes in what he says when he points out that he has no other goals, but it seems odd and more than a little discombobulated way of thinking when you see him take a fight against someone like Peter Manfredo Jr., Roy Jones Jr., Bernard Hopkins and Sakio Bika instead of facing Dawson.
I hate to be the one to break this to him, but Dawson would likely mop the deck with these guys, easily beating them and probably by knockout. How, then, could Calzaghe choose them instead of Dawson? I mean, maybe if I saw this threw the mind a huge fan of his I could somehow see his reasoning for fighting them instead of Dawson, but I doubt it.
At the end of the day, though, in retiring after facing these guys instead of Dawson, it leaves me with the impression that Calzaghe couldn’t take the heat and decided to get out of the kitchen before he ended up losing badly and thus tarnishing his unbeaten record. I certainly don’t mind a fighter padding their record at the end of the career to make a little extra money with some easy fights, but only if they had fought an entire career against a lot of talented fighters.
Unfortunately, Calzaghe has faced few fighters that I would consider talented or anywhere close to the level of a young Hopkins, Jones or a Dawson. This is why I can’t see a reason for Calzaghe bypassing a fight with Dawson, saying that he’s accomplished all his goals. Leaving a fighter like Dawson out there without a fight, it strikes me as Calzaghe dodging him and getting out now rather than staying on and being pressured to fight him.
Indeed, if Calzaghe had stayed on for a fight or two, he would have likely faced steady, unrelenting pressure to fight Dawson, especially if Calzaghe did something strange like giving Jones a rematch or facing a lesser opponent in the light heavyweight or super middleweight divisions.
I would excuse him if he fought a talented fighter like Carl Froch, because that guy brings it every time and is a true blue collar fighter, but I would still expect Calzaghe to face Dawson before retiring, because you can’t ignore a fighter that people consider to be the top fighter in the light heavyweight division, can you?
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