By Sean McDaniel: Recently there was a big fuss made about the referee scheduled to work Saturday’s fight between IBF/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko and WBA champion David Haye due to Haye’s camp believing that the referee, Genaro Rodriguez, will allow Wladimir to get away with a lot of holding and leaning on Haye.
Rodriguez has previously worked on four fights of Wladimir in the past, and hasn’t got in the way of Wladimir’s holding. Haye and is team don’t want Wladimir to be able to hold because it will give him a chance to stop the shorter Haye from punching on the inside and will give Wladimir a method to wear Haye down by leaning on him in the clinch.
However, Haye has never been easy to clinch because he often keeps punching when his opponents try to grab him. So the question here is what happens to Wladimir if either the referee or Haye don’t allow him to hold? Will Wladimir struggle without the ability to hold and lean or will this not really matter?
There’s a couple of ways of seeing this. One, Haye doesn’t really fight on the inside. He’s someone that likes to throw long looping shots against fighters usually in the height range of 6’2” to 6’3”. With Haye fighting in an in and out style, it won’t make it necessary for Wladimir to hold in this fight.
Wladimir is also able to fight without holding. Earlier in his career, before he was trained by Emanuel Steward, Wladimir never used to hold. If you look at his fight with Chris Byrd in 2000, Wladimir did almost zero holding.
So it’s not impossible for Wladimir to get through a fight without holding. He may not need it and could fight well without it. It just means that Haye will have to fight harder and move more because if Wladimir isn’t holding it means he’ll be stalking and jabbing Haye. That’s not a good thing for Haye.
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