By Chris Williams: After injuring his back in training, former cruiserweight champion David Haye (22-1, 21 KO’s) appears to have been left in the dust by International Boxing Federation and World Boxing Organization heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko (52-3, 46 KO’s) who is in the process of looking for a replacement opponent for his June 20th bout at the Veltins Arena, in Gelsenkirchen, Germany.
Haye, 28, is asking for Wladimir to wait three additional weeks beyond the June 20th original date of their fight and wants to fight Wladimir on July 11th while his back heals. However, for Klitschko to accept that offer he’d be taking a huge risk because if Haye wasn’t ready by then 11th of July, Wladimir would be left with almost zero time to find an opponent to step in and take the fight at the last minute.
With over 60,000 tickets already sold for the fight, that’s a chance that Klitschko doesn’t appear to be willing to take. I can’t blame Wladimir, because when a fighter is dealing with a back injury it can be something that lingers a lot longer than six weeks. Depending on the extent of the injury, it could take many months or even years for it to heal and six weeks would seem like a very short amount of time for an injury affecting that part of the body.
Wladimir isn’t happy with having had to wait this long for a fight with Haye, because Wladimir wanted the fight to take place months ago, but waited longer because he thought the fight was going to be taking place at the Stamford Bridge, but that fell through.
If Klitschko does decide to take Haye up on his offer of postponing the fight until July 11th, there’s no telling whether HBO or the German TV stations will show the fight because other boxing and sporting events are already scheduled for Saturday night on the same date that Haye wants to reschedule.
As such, Wladimir probably is better off moving on to another opponent and letting Haye fight someone else once his injury heals. Wladimir won’t be able to fight Haye for some time after this because Wladimir has to fight his IBF mandatory challenger Alexander Povetkin next up.
This means that if Haye is still hot after a fight with Wladimir he’ll most likely have to wait until 2010 unless Wladimir destroys Povetkin in the 1st for 2nd rounds without taking a lot of punishment. For Haye, it would mean that he would have to fight a couple of times before he fights Wladimir at some point in the future.
With a history of having problems taking hard shots from smaller fighters in the cruiserweight division, Haye would have to be very careful whom he fights in the heavyweight division. Haye would likely take on a couple of lower level heavyweights rather than risk fighting a good heavyweight and get knocked out or beaten up.
Haye’s not a big heavyweight and would have problems against the taller heavyweights like Alexander Dimitrenko and Kali Meehan, so I doubt he would fight them. My guess is that Haye would stay busy fighting heavyweights like Brian Minto, Gonzalo Omar Basile, David Rodriguez or Alex Mazkin.
In other words, lower ranked heavyweights in the top 15 that Haye would have a better chance of beating. Haye would be likely have problems against fighters like Lamon Brewster, Eddie Chambers, Samuel Peter, Dimitrenko, Povetkin, Chris Arreola, Alexander Ustinov, Martin Rogan, Oleg Maskaev, John Ruiz, Dennis Boystsov and Kevin Johnson, as well as another 10 heavyweights in the division. Haye needs to avoid these guys because they would have good chance of beating him due to his glass jaw and lack of experience against heavyweights.
Wladimir is looking to fight WBA heavyweight in recess Ruslan Chagaev on June 20th, and so far Chagaev is interested in taking the fight. The only thing that needs to be settled are the terms. Chagaev recently had his fight cancelled last weekend with Nikolay Valuev in Finland after Chagaev failed the medical exam prior to the fight.
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