By Scott Gilfoid: In an article at the Southwalesargus.co.uk, Joe Calzaghe (46-0, 32 KOs) said about his retirement that he’s not making a “rash, Floyd Mayweather-style retirement”, and that he plans on staying retired. Calzaghe then said there’s no one out there for him to fight now and that probably won’t change in the near future come next year. He sounds disingenuous because with Chad Dawson, Carl Froch, and Bernard Hopkins still out there, Calzaghe seems to be ignoring reality.
Ending his career against Roy Jones Jr., a 40 year-old legend, who’s probably seen his best days 10 years ago, makes Calzaghe look like a cherry picker. Yeah, I’d call this a Floyd Mayweather Jr. retirement if I ever saw one. Mayweather retired just as great welterweight fighters Miguel Cotto, Antonio Margarito and Paul Williams were entering their prime and becoming too popular to be ignored by Mayweather.
If he had stuck around the sport much longer, he would have no doubt been forced to fight them. He certainly couldn’t have kept fighting Oscar De La Hoya over and over again without sickening the public nor could he have continued to beat up Ricky Hatton without stop.
Mayweather retired when it just so happened he was faced with a trio of fighters that would have given him pure hell, and likely beaten him. With Calzaghe, he had spent a good portion of his career faithfully defending his WBO super middleweight crown against lesser fighters for the most part.
Finally, towards the end of his career, he stepped it up a few times in fight Jeff Lacy, Mikkel Kessler and Bernard Hopkins in back to back fights. He beat two of them, but the fight against Hopkins was a loss in my eyes. Now, with the prospect of looking at facing an even better fighter in the 26 year-old Chad Dawson, the best in the light heavyweight division, Calzaghe suddenly announced his retirement.
The suddenness of his retirement, which coincided with Dawson emerging as the number #1 fighter that boxing fans wanted to see Calzaghe fight, looked mighty suspicious in a Mayweather-esque type way. If that wasn’t a Mayweather type retirement, then what is?
All Calzaghe had to do to quiet his critics was face down Dawson, beat him and then walk away as a living legend. Instead, as everyone now knows, Calzaghe chose to step away, leaving a fight against faded Roy Jones Jr. as being his last fight of his career.
Had Calzaghe faced better competition in his career, he might have been able to get away with taking an easy fight for his last bout of his career, but instead his career was chock full of marginal fighters without the skills needed to give him much of a challenge. When finally faced with a big threat from Dawson, Froch and a rematch with Hopkins, Calzaghe chooses retirement. How sad. I don’t know about you, but that seems very much like Mayweather.
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