By William Mackay: Through a career that spanned 16 years with three titles won in the super middleweight division, Joe Calzaghe (46-0, 32) incredibly only has a small handful of opponents that I would consider to be good fighters. The vast majority of them fought in a nine year period when he held the WBO super middleweight title were mostly forgettable opponents, not the type that would stand out and garner attention.
With such an uneven career in terms of talented opposition, is Calzaghe’s legacy diminished by the fact that he didn’t fight Roy Jones Jr. and Bernard Hopkins earlier in their career and go after fights against Chad Dawson, Kelly Pavlik, Jermain Taylor, Edison Miranda, and Carl Froch. Leaving those kinds of fighters still out there and not giving them a match in the past couple of years, while going after a 40 year-old Jones and a 43 year-old Hopkins, doesn’t give a favorable impression to Calzaghe.
Indeed, arguably the best opponents in Calzaghe’s entire career were the 40+ Hopkins and Jones, which doesn’t say a lot for Calzaghe in waiting so long to fight them. During the first nine years that Calzaghe held onto his WBO strap, it seems astounding that the best he faced during that time was an old Chris Eubank, Robin Reid, Omar Sheika and Richie Woodhall.
Why didn’t Calzaghe go after Jones, Hopkins or James Toney during that period? Those fights likely would have easily made much more money than fighting any other opponent that Calzaghe took on during this time. So why did he fail in making the fights?
It appears that Calzaghe was content to get the most out of the WBO title, fighting within this division and prolonging the time that he was able to hold onto the title by facing the mostly limited opposition in the division. He may have succeeded in defending the title for nine of those first years, but he has little to show for it in terms of big career fights that catch the eye.
In facing Jeff Lacy in 2006, Calzaghe ended up fighting someone that wasn’t all that good. Many fans mistakenly claim that Calzaghe ruined Lacy as a fighter, but that’s completely off base. The ones that say this weren’t familiar with Lacy and had probably never seen him fight before Calzaghe fought him.
Believe me, if they had seen Lacy’s fight with Omar Sheika, a close 12-round unanimous decision in 2004, they would see the pretty much the same fighter that exists to this day. After losing to Calzaghe in 2006, Lacy remained the same fighter he was before, the only that changed was that he was now facing better fighters for the most compared to the ones that he was being served up prior to fighting Calzaghe.
Because of that, you can scratch Lacy’s name off the list of Calzaghe’s important opponents. Jermain Taylor recently defeated Lacy in even an more impressive manner than Calzaghe did, winning every round and soundly beating him. Victories over Jones and Hopkins can equally be dismissed due to the age of the two fighters, while Mikkel Kessler isn’t all that impressive either because Kessler has faced only one fighter in his career that could be considered a elite fighter, with the rest being largely mediocre in talent.
In retiring now and leaving important fights against Dawson, Froch and Taylor behind, Calzaghe appears to be choosing a similar pattern of Floyd Mayweather Jr., who retired last year without having faced the three best welterweights in the division in Paul Williams, Miguel Cotto and Antonio Margarito. In Calzaghe’s case, he leaves multiple big name opponents behind and ones that would have helped shape his legacy if he had chosen to step it up against them.
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