By William Mackay: WBC super middleweight champion Carl Froch (25-0, 20 KO’s) has sat on the sidelines much of his career watching fighters like WBO super middleweight champion Joe Calzaghe hog all the glory in the UK despite facing less than impressive foes through most of his career. Froch, a no nonsense type of guy who doesn’t believe in taking the halfway approach to his career, was turned off by what he was seeing and vowed that he would direct his career in a different way by taking the toughest fights possible, even if it meant facing tough odds like when he came to the United States to fight Jermain Taylor in April.
Froch’s risk taking paid off for him in that case with a 12th round TKO win that’s done wonders for Froch’s career. Keeping with that tradition, Froch immediately agreed to fight in Showtime’s six-man tournament when he was approached recently to participate.
The fighters in the tournament – Arthur Abraham, Andre Dirrell, Andre Ward, Mikkel Kessler and Jermain Taylor – are among the best fighters in all of boxing. Froch, 32, will be faced with fighting the young 26-year-old Dirrell in his first fight, a very tough opponent with a lot of speed and power.
Froch will have to find a way to get past him and two other fighters in order to make it to the 2nd round of competition. It won’t be easy for Froch, because he’s probably the slowest of the participants in terms of hand speed, so he’s going to need to try and use his power, pressure and his chin to try and get past the quicker fighters.
Froch isn’t a stranger to fighting opponents with fast hand speed, beating both Jean Pascal and Jermain Taylor in back to back fights recently. Froch had problems early against both of them and was behind in the fights going into the second half.
However, Froch’s power and constant pressure wore both Pascal and Taylor down as the fight went into the later rounds. What started out to be a mismatch ended up with Froch taking the fight to the quicker Taylor and Pascal, eventually beating both of them.
If Froch can get by the likes of Dirrell, Ward, Abraham and Kessler, Carl feels that he will have put himself in the position to become the next big star in the sport. If he can come out the winner of the tournament, Froch believes that he will have accomplished more in his career than Calzaghe did. I think there would be a lot of people in agreement with Froch about that.
While Calzaghe did have a nice career, he faced only a small handful of fighters – Bernard Hopkins, Kessler and Jeff Lacy – not the sheer number of talented fighters that are participating in the Showtime tournament. However, Froch isn’t the name that boxing fans and experts are mentioning as to who the likely winner of the tournament will be, unfortunately. Most people are in agreement that either Kessler or Ward will come out the winner in the tournament, so Froch has his work cut out for him.
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