Photo: Naoki Fukuda / SHOWTIME -By Sean McDaniel: Despite beating Jean Pascal in December to capture the WBC super middleweight title, Carl Froch (24-0, 19 KOs) still doesn’t get anywhere close the kind of respect and media attention that Joe Calzaghe did during his career. Of course, Calzaghe held his WBO super middleweight title for 10 long years without suffering a defeat. Froch obviously has a long ways to go before he’s thought of in similar terms and at thirty-one, he may never reach it due to his advanced age.
But, Froch can win a lot of respect from British and American boxing fans if he can beat Jermain Taylor on Saturday night.
Right about now, there are a significant proportion of fans that don’t think that Froch can beat Taylor. However, if he beats him and looks good in doing so, Pascal can pick up a lot of attention that so far he’s been missing in his career.
Froch had hoped that Joe Calzaghe would fight him before retiring, but Joe never showed any interest in fighting him, and retired recently. Perhaps Calzaghe would have fought Froch if Carl had a better resume. Indeed, at the time that Calzaghe retired, Froch had little substance on his boxing record in terms of quality opponents.
Froch seems to understand why Calzaghe chose not to fight him, and has set out to improve his standing among fans by first traveling to Connecticut to face Taylor, a former WBC/WBO middleweight champion.
Although Froch will get a lot of attention at home if he can beat Taylor, he will still in all likelihood fail to get the respect that he craves by fans in the United States. The reason for this is pretty obvious. Taylor has been beaten in two out of his last three fights, and no longer looks like the same fighter he was earlier in his career.
Beating Taylor would only prove that Froch could accomplish what a smaller fighter, Kelly Pavlik, was able to do twice before. Beating Taylor will help Froch immensely in his boxing career, but it will take at least two or three similar fights for Froch to get the credit that he’s searching for.
It may take a win over fighters like Mikkel Kessler, Andre Ward, Andre Dirrell or Allan Green for Froch to get the respect he’s looking for. The good thing is that given that he’s a champion, it won’t be hard for him to get a shot at fighters like Dirrell, Ward and Green. A fight against Kessler would seem like a remote option, because he’s champion himself, and it won’t be easy trying to negotiate a unification deal with him.
Beating the likes of Ward and Dirrell might be asking too much of Froch. Unless he fights them almost immediately, I can’t see Froch having much of a chance when they get even better than they are now. Both are in their mid-twenties and are likely to get better in the future.
However, if Froch could beat one or both of them know, he would get a ton of respect in the boxing world and probably more than Calzaghe, because he chose to retire rather than stick around and face super middleweights like them.
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