By Chris Williams: I really hate to say this, but I can’t help thinking that Joe Calzaghe (46-0, 32 KOs) didn’t do enough risk taking in his boxing career and seemed content with facing the mediocre opposition in the WBO. I suppose if Calzaghe had accomplished his unbeaten 46-0 record by beating some talented fighters like a prime Roy Jones Jr., Bernard Hopkins or one of the younger lions like Chad Dawson, Kelly Pavlik, Andre Ward or Andre Dirrell, I could excuse him retiring with an unbeaten record.
To be honest, if Calzaghe had beaten one or all of those fighters, I would be the first person to say that he belongs in the boxing hall of fame. Those are talented fighters each one of them. But, unfortunately, Calzaghe didn’t fight any of them – at least he didn’t fight a prime version of Jones Jr. and Hopkins.
This is why I think there needs to be an asterisk inserted by his name in the record books, because the wins Calzaghe did get in his career – victories over opponents like Mario Veit, Rick Thornberry, and Bronko Sobot – weren’t enough to qualify him for any kind of boxing hall of fame type numbers if you ask me.
All Calzaghe had to do was fight someone like a young Hopkins, Jones Jr. or one of the mean punchers like Julian Jackson, Nigel Benn or Gerald McClellan, and Calzaghe would have had lasting fame just from the stand point of what he could have accomplished earlier in his career.
Instead, Calzaghe chose not to fight any of them, and stayed focused to fighting and beating the Mario Veit’s of the super middleweight division year after year for 10 years. It was a relief when Calzaghe finally, for a one small space of time in his career, stood up and fought Mikkel Kessler, Sakio Bika and Jeff Lacy.
That showed that Calzaghe was willing to take some risks, but not nearly the types of fighters he should have been fighting if you ask me. Kessler is totally unproven and looks like a white version of Winky Wright. Lacy has already since been exposed as not being the fighter that people thought he might be when he started his career. And Sakio Bika is mostly just a good fighter and not really world title material.
It’s one of the most disappointing things you can have in the sport of boxing when a fighter builds up a record against easy opponents, defeating them and thereby building a mystique built of so-called invincibility. It’s been done in the past many times over, and there’s fighters doing it now.
The lure of an unbeaten record for the television media is like gold, except, in many cases its fool’s gold and not the real thing. The only way to pierce the phony mystique of fighters like this is to force them to fight good opponents.
In most cases, things are self corrected when a fighter eventually wins a title and has to defend it over and over against top opponents.
However, when a fighter is in a division that isn’t known for having talented fighters, such as the super middleweight division in the 90s, then you can have a fighter that is capable of holding onto a title for a significant amount of time without having to face a truly talented opponent.
In the 90s, the super middleweight division, particularly the WBO, was one the worst in all of boxing, with fighters that many people have never heard of and ones that seemed out of place in boxing. I saw it as a last refuge for fighters not talented enough to compete in the middleweight or light heavyweight division, two of the more popular divisions throughout the years.
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