By William Mackay: If you watched last night’s HBO face off between WBA heavyweight champion David Haye and IBF/WBO heavyweight champ Wladimir Klitschko you’ll notice that Haye seemed to be in a celebratory mood during the entire interview, acting as if a win over Wladimir was already a forgone conclusion. Haye’s confidence seemed to be out of touch with his actual accomplishments both at the heavyweight and cruiserweight level.
To be sure, Haye’s victories at heavyweight has been limited to fighters in the age ranges of 36 to 39, and none of them were even remotely in the class of Wladimir. During the face off with Max Kellerman, Wladimir seemed to be studying Haye like a psychiatrist studying one of his patients that had a bad case of delusions of grandeur. At one point, Wladimir cut into one of Haye’s self promoting monologues, saying Don’t be happy about something you haven’t accomplished.”
Wladimir said this very quietly and it’s doubtful that Haye bothered to take it in because he continued with his talking of how much better he is than Wladimir without missing a beat. Haye seems to be overestimating his own abilities. After all, he barely beat Nikolay Valuev in a life and death bout in 2009, and struggled at beating John Ruiz, taking a lot of punishment from Ruiz when he couldn’t take out the ex-champion in the 1st round. Haye showed excessive pride throughout the interview and came off as if he were somehow omnipotent.
For a fighter with as little experience against quality opposition that Haye has, it seemed bizarre to see himself talking about how much better he was than Wladimir and downgrading the Ukrainian’s prevision opposition. Given that Haye recent fought a 39-year-old Audley Harrison, 38-year-old John Ruiz, 38-year-old Monte Barrett and a 36-year-old paper champion Valuev, Haye hardly had room to criticize Wladimir’s previous opponents. Even at cruiserweight, Haye never fought the likes of Tomasz Adamek, Marco Huck, or Steve Cunningham. He bailed on the division without facing those guys and has dined against aging heavyweights since moving up to the heavyweight division in 2008.
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