By Jason Kim: at 36 years-old, light heavyweight Joe Calzaghe (46-0, 32 KOs) is within a stone’s throw of former boxing great, heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano’s 49-0 record, which has stood for the past 53 years since Marciano retired from the sport in August 1955. At this point, Calzaghe is in a position that only a handful of other fighters – some good and some not so good – have been in boxing history.
He’s in an enviable position, because he only needs a mere three fights to tie record, and with the way he’s fighting, it should be easily within his grasp. Never mind about his age, because like Bernard Hopkins, Calzaghe fights like a fighter in his late 20s rather than his mid 30s. I think the age factor s more of a mental thing for Calzaghe than an actual physical thing, because he mentions his age quite often in interviews, pointing out that he’s getting old and that he wants to retire.
I think he’s really selling himself short and badly underestimating himself, because he looks to have a minimum of three to four more good years left in the tank before his age starts being a factor for him. However, even then, I think he’s got a style of fighting that few light heavyweights or super middleweights can match. His success is based more on speed, a high work rate and defense rather than power, which allows him to take advantage of his slower, less active opponents.
In a way, Calzaghe is like an endurance runner, someone that has been blessed with an extraordinary cardiovascular system that allows him to do things that other fighters can’t. I think he can easily stay on top for another four fights, as long as he continues to train in between fights and doesn’t let himself go.
With that said, I have serious doubts whether the boxing public would accept his record as genuine if Calzaghe continues to fight stiffs like Roy Jones Jr. and some of the other less than impressive fighters that Calzaghe has fought during his career. At this point, he’d almost have to fight quality fighters like Chad Dawson, Carl Froch, Jermain Taylor and Bernard Hopkins for the public to believe in him enough to value his 50-0 record.
The thing that Calzaghe has going for him, though, is that he appears to be fighting at a high enough level to beat all four of them if he wants to. But in order to do that, he’s going to have to be 100% committed to accomplishing this and get this talk of retirement out of his head, because none of those fights will be easy ones for him.
The fights against Hopkins and Dawson will take a super human effort from Calzaghe to get by them, because both match up with him very well. In the case of Hopkins, I think Calzaghe may have his number for the second fight, and has the knowledge now to beat him much easier than last time.
Calzaghe struggled with Hopkins early on, but once he figured Hopkins out, he outworked him in the second half of the fight. With Dawson, Calzaghe is going to have to stay on top of him at all times, take advantage of Dawson’s periodic lapses in concentration, and focus on out-working him in the second half of the fight when Dawson traditionally had problems with his stamina.
If Calzaghe can stay focused on those two fighters, preferably fighting them in his next two fights, then I think Calzaghe can easily defeat Froch and Taylor to first tie and then beat Marciano’s longstanding 49-0 record. If Calzaghe finishes at 50-0, having fought those kinds of fighters, he would earn a huge amount of praise and would go down in history as one of the greatest fighters of all time.
However, if he continues fighting faded fighters or ones with little name recognition, then few people will care much at all about his record. As things are now, his record isn’t all that impressive because of the low quality fighters that he’s built most of it on. It’s up to him to try and improve upon it and bring substance to it.
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