By Scott Gilfoid: Well, Joe Calzaghe is right when he says that he’d “probably get beat” if he came back. Calzaghe said that in an interview today with Setanta Sports. Calzaghe says that if he did come back, he feels it would be to get the big money that would be offered to him for fights and that would affect him, causing him to lose. That certainly makes sense, but I think that’s not the whole reason why Calzaghe would likely lose if he were to stage a comeback.
I think Calzaghe would lose because he’d end up facing someone better than the opponents that he faced in his 16-year pro career. Knowing Calzaghe, he’d probably be very shrewd in selecting his opponents for a comeback and would take one someone that he pretty much knows he could beat, a fighter like Roy Jones Jr., Carl Froch or one of the smaller middleweights like Felix Sturm.
No way could I see Calzaghe coming back for a rematch with Hopkins or to fight super middleweights like Andre Ward, Andre Dirrell or least of all Chad Dawson. Those are all losses for Calzaghe the way I see it, they would likely have been losses for Calzaghe even in the prime of his boxing career and not just after taking a few months off.
Calzaghe says that his “ultimate goal” wasn’t to make a lot of money, but rather to “be the best.” That’s a hard one for me to swallow, let me tell you. How can Calzaghe say his goal was always to be the best when he never fought Chad Dawson, or other good fighters like Andre Dirrell, Lucian Bute, Librado Andrade, Andrade Ward or Edison Miranda.
Those are the fighters that Calzaghe should have been fighting in his career, not a 40-year-old Roy Jones Jr. or a 43-year-old Bernard Hopkins. If I were Calzaghe, I wouldn’t have fought Hopkins or Jones, because after all, my goal would be not to make a lot of money, it would to try and “be the best.”
For me to achieve that, I would have had to bypass opponents like Peter Manfredo Jr., Evans Ashira, Mario Veit and a ton of other fighters that I don’t see as worthy of goal to try and be the best. I would have then gone after Jermain Taylor before he was beaten by Kelly Pavlik. Likewise, I would have gone after Pavlik before he was beaten by Hopkins, and I would have fought both Hopkins and Jones in their prime rather than fighting them in their 40s.
To top it off, I would have fought Julian Jackson, Gerald McClellan and Nigel Benn at the start of my career when these fighters were still in their prime. And you know what? I would have been the best and would have proved it by fighting them best rather than a bunch of fighters that I’ve never heard of in my life.
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