Froch could fight past 40

By Boxing News - 11/16/2012 - Comments

Image: Froch could fight past 40By Scott Gilfoid: 35-year-old IBF super middleweight champion Carl Froch (29-2, 21 KO’s) figures he can go another five years into his 40s as a fighter. Froch is projecting that he can still fight at a high enough level to be effective even that far in the future as he approaches his fight tomorrow night against Yusaf Mack (31-4-2, 17 KO’s) in Nottingham.

Froch said to the Dailymail.co.uk “Rob [McCracken] wants me to do it…why not? Age is a number. I live right. No smoking, no drinking, no putting on weight. I feel great. A lot of my recent fights looked like wars but I haven’t taken too much punishment.”

Well, let me tell you. I think Froch shouldn’t be looking beyond this year, because it was only a short while ago that Froch was talking about retiring if he lost to Arthur Abraham following Froch’s loss to Mikkel Kessler in 2010. For someone whose career hangs on such a fine string as that, I don’t see possible that Froch can fight another five years. He may talk a good game now, but those are just words.

Believe me, if Froch gets KO’ed by Mack tomorrow night anything is possible. If you look at Froch losing consecutive times it’s hard to imagine him wanting to continue his career. If he was talking about retirement following his loss to Kessler in the past then you can imagine that we might be seeing something similar in the future. My point is things can change rapidly in boxing for the worse and talking about fighting until a ripe age of 40 is incredibly premature when things can go bad overnight. Do you know what I mean? Froch at 40 isn’t the same fighter he is right now.

I’d like to think that Froch wouldn’t retire off of two straight losses, because it would send out a wrong message. If Amir Khan isn’t retiring after losing two straight fights then why should Froch? Let’s be real about this. You can make a strong case that Froch almost lost three straight fights in his bouts with Jermain Taylor, Andre Dirrell and Mikkel Kessler. Those fights came in sequence and Froch almost lost to Taylor, and got a HIGHLY questionable decision over Dirrell and then lost to Kessler.

The Dirrell-Froch fight might have resulted in a loss for Froch if the bout had taken place in the United States instead of the UK, and Froch had to pull out the Jermain Taylor fight by stopping him in the last seconds, because otherwise Froch would have lost. My point is Froch isn’t dominating to a level where he’s not going to run into problems in the near future, and when that happens I have a strong feeling that Froch will fold up his cards and retire well before he reaches 40. That’s why I think it’s silly for him to be talking about fighting into his 40th birthday.



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