By Scott Gilfoid: David Haye (26-2, 24 KOs) says he made it a point to bulk up for his fight against #10 WBA Mark De Mori (30-1-2, 26 KOs) for their heavyweight fight on Saturday night. Haye, 35, says he ate more and didn’t worry about keeping his weight down. The results were Haye putting on a significant amount of weight and coming in at 227lbs at Friday’s weigh-in. De Mori still outweighs Haye in coming in at 243lbs.

Haye doesn’t think that the added weight is going to hurt him on Saturday night when he faces De Mori at the O2 Arena in London, UK. We’re going to have to find out though, because Haye has put on a lot of weight and is 17 pounds heavier than he was for his last three fights many years ago.

Since Haye’s entire game has been built on speed, it could be a real problem for him if he’s lost his speed because of his weight. Haye could be another Roy Jones Jr., a fighter that was good earlier in his career due to his hand speed. When Jones got older, he slowed down and started getting blasted out left and right.

“I’ve been packing in food as much as I can. I used to diet down a lot; the ethos in my own training camps was to get as light as possible and come in around 15st,” Haye said to skysports.com. “I would lose a stone just by cutting down my food down as the general consensus back then was the lighter I was, the closer I was to cruiserweight and the faster I’d be.”

I think Haye is kidding himself if he thinks he’s going to be a better fighter after bulking up. That kind of thing is something you do when you’re a younger fighter and still growing. But with Haye, he’s now an old timer and clearly closer to 40 than 30 in my view. When you get an old timer putting on a lot of weight, it’s a red flag for disaster in my opinion.

I’m just saying. Don’t saying I didn’t tell you all so. Haye is going in the wrong direction with this weight business. I mean, it obviously isn’t going to keep him from beating De Mori, because Haye could probably beat this guy even if he ballooned up 300 pounds.

My guess is Haye is going to stay close to 230 for the remainder of his comeback rather than carving that useless bodybuilding muscle off his hide and get lean like Deontay Wilder, so that he can throw with speed and still have his stamina if he needs it.

If I was Haye’s trainer, I’d have had him on the track every day with track spikes on so that we could sprint that muscle off of him. If you get Haye spring 10 x 200 meter sprints and 10 x 100 meter sprints per workout, 7 days a week, he’d have that muscle off in no time. Then have him run some hills afterwards.

“That was all good and well but when you’re cutting weight and sparring big guys, I got injured so the reason to not do that is injury prevention,” Haye said. “I’ve been eating every two-and-a-half hours, its really annoying! I’d set my alarm to eat to make sure my weight didn’t get too low.”

I don’t think Haye’s injuries have anything to do with him being trim. His first injury was a hand injury. How in the heck does that have to be with being light? The second injury was supposedly a cut that he sustained on his face. That’s nothing that could have been prevented if Haye were heavier. The third injury was a shoulder problem.

You can’t blame that on weight. I think that might have been something caused by Haye not being flexible enough, or it could be an age thing. When you hit you’re 30s like Haye, you’re officially an old lion, and they suffer injuries unfortunately.

You can’t expect an old lion not to come up lame every once in a while. As brittle as Haye has proven to be, he should have stopped sparring ages ago so that he would increase the chances of him making it into the ring in one piece.

The Haye-De Mori fight will be taking place at the O2 Arena in London, UK. It’s still unclear how many people will show up for the fight. My guess is it might be a ghost town in there on Saturday because it’s not a compelling must see type of fight. I think it’s more of a cringe-worthy train wreck type of fight.