Haye-Klitschko: Can David Scare Wladimir Into Losing?

By Boxing News - 04/04/2009 - Comments

wladimir88321By Matt Stein: In watching British heavyweight David Haye prepare for his bouts with Enzo Maccarinelli and Wladimir Klitschko, I’ve noticed that Haye likes to use a lot of intimidation in speaking about his opponents, often making bold threats about how he’s going to destroy them, questioning their manhood and other such nonsense. I understand that this generally goes with the territory for boxing and has become the accustomed rituals more or less before fights.

However, Haye, I’ve noticed, takes thing to another level, going beyond the norm in his attempts to mentally psyche out his opponents. It’s as if he’s trying to scare Wladimir with his threats so that the Ukrainian will stress out and not perform up to his best level.

With Haye, I don’t believe he’s doing this just a mindless ritual, but rather he’s doing it because he actually wants Wladimir to be so afraid that he’ll literally crumble to pieces the night of the fight. What I’ve noticed about fighters and people who use a lot of intimidation is that they often want to succeed so badly, that they’ll try anything in order to win.

It’s as if they don’t really trust that they can win a fight based on their talent alone and have to resort to mind games to try to get an edge. It’s effective, but in a way it doesn’t tell the true story of who the most talented fighter is. What it does end up showing is who the more mentally stronger fighter is, at least in terms of being able to understand the mental games that are being played.

If a person has been brought up in an environment where psyching out one’s opponent is the norm, then they generally use the games and are almost immune to having another fighter attempt to use the same tactics on them. Haye seems to be one of those types of fighters that have been brought up to use the intimidation before bouts in order to get any extra edge he can.

In the case of Wladimir Klitschko, he appears to have not been taught how to deal with intimidation and the trash talk that goes with it. That’s why Wladimir was so susceptible to Haye’s badgering to get Wladimir to accept a fight with him. If Wladimir understood the game, he would have fired back at Haye, preferably in the media, or simply ignored him altogether.

That would have been the wise thing for Wladimir to do. Now, Wladimir finds himself against an opponent who is skilled at intimidation, trash talk and who appears to be the more forceful personality, and he doesn’t seem one bit comfortable with it.

There’s still over two months to go before the fight, and yet Wladimir appears already to be uncomfortable with Haye’s daily comments. Wladimir may say that it’s not bothering him, but it clearly is, just as it was for his brother Vitali, who also seemed extremely bothered by Haye’s intimidation and gamesmanship.

For fighters like Haye, they enjoy taking on naïve opponents like Wladimir and Vitali, fighters that are so easily annoyed and who end up in a rage because of a few pinpoint insults. I think Wladimir made a mistake in taking this fight.

I think he’s going to go to pieces with Haye’s daily insults and by fight time on June 20th, Wladimir will be a nervous wreck or else he’ll be so angry because of Haye’s constant put downs, that he’ll fight out of control and get hurt.

Since I doubt Wladimir could learn to understand what Haye’s doing and try to adapt to it before the fight, I think Wladimir needs to try and shut himself off from the dialogue from Haye somehow. Unfortunately, that’s not really possible because in order to sell the fight, Wladimir and Haye will have to appear together on a number of occasions, at which time Haye will be able to work on Wladimir’s fragile psyche.



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