By Sean McDaniel: In a move to avoid having to face his dangerous mandatory Carl Froch, undefeated super middleweight Joe Calzaghe (45-0, 32 KOs) earlier today gave up his WBC super middleweight title, thus putting him in the position to take on Roy Jones Jr. (52-4, 38 KOs) for later on this year. In the meantime, Froch will be going ahead and possibly taking on Jermain Taylor for Calzaghe’s vacated WBC super middleweight title. The move by Calzaghe, 36, is especially disappointing one for many of his boxing fans, who had hoped that he would take on a better opponent than Jones, preferably the unbeaten knockout artist Kelly Pavlik, who has been especially keen on fighting Calzaghe.

However, Calzaghe had stated publicly that he’s not interested in fighting Palik, saying that he’s not in the same class as Calzaghe and would only end up losing.

In terms of money, Calzaghe appears to be doing the right thing by fighting the 39 year-old Jones, who despite being not even close to as good as he once was earlier in his boxing career, remains very popular with many boxing fans. Pavlik, as good as he now is, had of yet to get anywhere near the same following as Jones. That may change in the future as Pavlk, hopefully, continues to pile up victories and gets better known by the fans, but as of now he remains an unknown to the many casual boxing fans. He hasn’t helped his case as of late, fighting Gary Lockett, a fighter from Wales that not even hardcore fans had heard of.

Calzaghe is coming off a controversial 12-round split decision over 43 year-old Bernard Hopkins in April, a fight in which Calzaghe was dropped in the 1st round and had to struggle in many rounds against the crafty Hopkins. Before the fight, it had been thought that Calzaghe would be too fast and would overwhelm Hopkins with his high volume offense. This didn’t happen, as Hopkins clinched Calzaghe often, slowing the fight down dramatically and preventing Calzaghe from getting his own offense ever really started. In the end, Calzaghe out-landed Hopkins by a slight margin, yet all of the bigger shots were landed by Hopkins.

The fight didn’t make Calzaghe look good, since he had to struggle to beat a fighter well past his prime, and for many people, they thought that Hopkins was the one that actually should have won the fight.

Calzaghe has said that his bout with Jones will be his last fight, and that he doesn’t plan on continuing on to face Pavlik later on down the road. This has left a bad taste in many fans’ mouth, most of which see the fight against Jones as totally unnecessary and contrary to what Calzaghe has said, it won’t help improve his boxing legacy one iota. Indeed, for most people, it seems like a move that will actually detract from Calzaghe’s career, leaving a permanent stain with it, almost like an asterisk in which states, ‘retired unbeaten, but only because he was too afraid to fight Pavlik.’ Most fans can see this, but I wonder why Calzaghe can’t? I do see the fight with Jones as being potentially interesting one, certainly much more appealing than the dull fight with Hopkins.

Yet, this fight is a rather poor one to end Calzaghe’s boxing career on, considering that there is much better fight against Pavlik that needs attending to. If Calzaghe had said that he’d be facing Pavlik after taking on Jones, then, of course, people would be much more open to the idea of Calzaghe fighting Jones.

It would be like the fans having to put up with something bad this time, purchasing what will likely be an expensive PPV fight, just so that they could be paid back later on when Calzaghe faces Pavlik. In this case, that’s not going to happen, and the fans are expected to purchase the Jones fight, which amounts to be a farce, with no real reason to other than to watch Calzaghe fight his last bout.