By William Mackay: Former IBF/WBA/WBC/WBO super middleweight champion Joe Calzaghe (46-0, 32 KO’s) quashed rumors that he’ll be staging a comeback by saying today that he has no plans of coming out of his two-year retirement to continue his boxing career. Calzaghe, 38, last fought two years ago in November 2008 with a 12 round unanimous decision win over Roy Jones Jr. In an article at ESPN, Calzaghe said “There’s no truth that I’m coming back. A lot of boxers come back from retirement but when I retired from boxing, I said I intended to retire and nothing has changed from that.”
There was talk that Calzaghe might comeback for a rematch with 45-year-old Bernard Hopkins, who Calzaghe defeated by a 12 round split decision two years ago in April 2008. Although that would be a fight that would likely give Calzaghe a decent payday, it would be pretty much meaningless for boxing fans because most of them would likely prefer to see Calzaghe fight one of the younger stars in the super middleweight division like Andre Ward, Andre Dirrell, Mikkel Kessler or Lucian Bute rather than seeing Calzaghe go over old ground in a fight with the aging Hopkins. Their fight in 2008 was painfully boring and the thought of the two fighting again would seem more than a little off-putting for some boxing fans.
Hopkins hasn’t been looking very good in his last two fights and it would have been a hard sell for boxing fans to want to see a rematch between the two fighters. It would also seem unlikely that Calzaghe would be willing to risk his unbeaten record against the younger top super middleweights Dirrell, Ward and Bute. Apart from Bute, those fighters were still working their way up the super middleweight ladder when Calzaghe chose to retire in 2008.
While Calzaghe dominated the super middleweight division during the dead years of the division, the super middleweight division is now one of the best in the sport right now and it’s unclear whether Calzaghe would be good enough to be a champion at the this point. The current fighters are a huge step up from the fighters that existed during most of the years that Calzaghe was a champion. If Calzaghe did return to boxing now, he would face a lot of criticism if he sidestepped around the top super middleweights and picked out older, more vulnerable fighters that he has a pretty good idea that he can still beat rather than facing the cream of the super middleweight crop.
Calzaghe says “Richard [Schaefer, the CEO of Golden Boy Promotions] and I spoke about it a few months ago when I was in LA with my girlfriend. I said ‘possibly’ and I went away to have some time to think about it, whether I wanted to do it, who the potential opponents could be. But I went to the gym a couple of times and I realized that I didn’t want to. I have come out of my career relatively unmarked and I have ended undefeated world champion so it’s a blessing that I can end my career like that really and I don’t want to push it and get greedy and fall back into that temptation that you would always regret for the rest of your life.”
It’s unfortunate that Calzaghe didn’t take on Bute, Carl Froch or take on Ward before he retired from the sport, because there are fans that felt that Calzaghe benefited by dominating against the weaker competition that was permeating the super middleweight division during the years that he held his titles.
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