By Chris Williams: In looking at Joe Calzaghe’s retirement today, I’m left feeling disappointed about his career. On one the one half, he retires with an unbeaten record of 46-0, but on the other half, most of the victories were over less than stellar opposition. That’s the sad part. I can count on one the first three fingers of my hand that amount of fighters that I could consider semi-good, and I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count all the crappy fighters that Calzaghe built up his unbeaten record on.
Perhaps it’s a good thing that he’s finally retired from boxing, ridding us of having to waste time watching him fight one soft opponent after another, while make excuses for not facing better ones like Chad Dawson, Kelly Pavlik, Carl Froch, Lucian Bute…etc. He’s certainly accomplished something in retiring undefeated, you can’t take that away from the guy, but, gosh, I sure would have liked to have seen him fight some solid fighters among many of those victories.
History has been littered with fighters that have built up records based on beating fluff opponents, fighters like Brian Nielson who was an incredible 49-0 before losing for the first time in his career to journeyman Dicky Ryan in 1999. Calzaghe might have been a great fighter if he had taken on some better opposition in his career, but unfortunately he didn’t.
Like many other boxing writers and fans alike, I held out hope that Calzaghe would start facing better fighters in the tail end of his career. Instead, Calzaghe continued moving against mostly soft opponents until the very end of his career, ignoring fighters like Froch, Dawson and Pavlik and giving excuses why he was choosing people like the faded Jones to fight.
Somehow, it made Calzaghe look timid to me, as if he was trying to avoid taking on someone tough that would spoil his unbeaten record, even though his record could never be considered perfect due to the lack of substance contained inside of it. In a way, it’s alike a someone mastering a general math class, getting an A in the class semester after semester and not stepping it up to take on higher math.
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