By Michael Lieberman: Former World Boxing Organization super middleweight champion Joe Calzaghe (46-0, 32 KOs) finally called it a career today after a 16 year pro career which he finished without a blemish on his record. Calzaghe, 36, in leaving at this point in his career he finishes with a lot of unanswered questions about his ability stemming from the lack of high caliber opposition on his resume.
Although his British fans would probably never admit it, Calzaghe’s career is very similar to another super middleweight who retired undefeated by the name of Sven Ottke. Like Calzaghe, Ottke also had few big names on his record and spent the entirety of his career fighting in front of home audiences in Germany, where he was sometimes given the benefit of the doubt in close decisions.
In Calzaghe’s case, he only has a handful of wins over notable opponents in his entire career, and even with them, probably only a couple is worth noting. Calzaghe’s biggest problem is that the best fighters on his resume – Roy Jones Jr. and Bernard Hopkins – were in or near their 40s when he finally fought them.
Calzaghe’s other notable opponents, Byron Mitchell, Richie Woodhall, Charles Brewer doesn’t hold up well against the current super middleweight competition. Indeed, I would probably be a stretch to see any of them making the top 10, much less fighting for a title.
Jeff Lacy, who Calzaghe defeated by a 12-round decision in 2006, has since been exposed by other fighters, making Calzaghe’s win look much less impressive. Mikkel Kessler, probably the best win of Calzaghe’s career, is a wait and see fighter. Aside from Calzaghe, Kessler hasn’t fought against enough quality super middleweights to see how good he really is. Once Kessler fights for awhile we’ll see how good he is.
However, that in itself it’s enough to match Calzaghe’s inflated 46-0 record, which given his lack of opposition one must conclude that it’s more than a little padded. Missing from Calzaghe’s 16 year professional career are fights against a prime James Toney, Hopkins, Jones, Nigel Benn and Julian Jackson. With the whole mess of mostly unknown fighters that litter Calzaghe’s resume, you would have like to have though that he would have found the time to fight those guys at some point.
For all his supposed greatness, he should have found a way to set up a fight with at least one of them instead of fighting people like Mario Veit twice and fighting a whole slew of largely unknown and little thought of opponents. If someone were to ask me to show them a fighter with a padded record, I, without even thinking, would pick out both Ottke and Calzaghe as two that would come to mind the quickest.
Their unbeaten records are pretty much a legacy of their mostly mediocre opposition rather than an indication of how good they were. In all things being equal, if you were to match Toney, a young Jones, Hopkins, Benn and Jackson against the same mostly soft opposition that Calzaghe fought throughout his career, I’d be willing to bet that they would also arrive at the same 46-0 record, except that they would probably have many more knockouts and more impressive performances than Joe.
It’s too bad that Calzaghe didn’t fight better fighters in his career, because he might have been a good one. I say might, because my feelings are that if he fought those guys, he’d have ended his career with a record of 41-5, with five knockout losses. Calzaghe was a good fighter, I’ll agree to that, but he was more in the Ottke class than in the class of Hopkins, Jones, Benn, Jackson and Toney.
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