Charles Jay

Joe Calzaghe is really not my kind of fighter. He looks kind of awkward. He’s not an especially hard hitter. He throws those annoying little pitty-pat punches.

He’s also white. And as Bernard Hopkins has let us know, he “will never lose to a white guy.”

But guess what? He’s about to.

Hopkins has been an outstanding champion in the past - a guy who held a dominant position in the middleweight division. But when putting his career in its proper perspective, it deserved a nuanced exploration. When my reporter friend Patrick Kehoe asked me my opinion of Hopkins a few years ago, this is part of what I said:

“….He is an outstanding fighter - tough, durable, hard-nosed, and a credit to the sport inside the ring. He is a very solid champion. And when he is eligible, he will get my Hall of Fame vote. That won’t be because of all his title defenses (Orlando Canizales and Virgil Hill had a lot of title defenses too, but they would be, at best, just borderline candidates in my mind), but because in addition to the above attributes, it can be said that he was the best in his weight division for a period of more than ten years.

He isn’t.

The truth is, while I have tremendous respect for Hopkins, and admire the fact that he was able to move up in weight and beat Antonio Tarver at the light heavyweight level. But in a sense, Hopkins has gotten something of a free ride over the last several years. He’s gotten to face a couple of welterweights who were in effect moving up, in Oscar De La Hoya and Felix Trinidad, on which he has built an enhanced reputation. He was able to face a rather non-aggressive challenger in Jermain Taylor, who was tentative enough to allow Hopkins to keep things close on the scorecards. Tarver just didn’t look like he showed up to fight, and as we have seen in his own recent bouts, Tarver is pretty mich a shot fighter. And Winky Wright, who had moved from junior middleweight to middleweight to 170 pounds, is the type of fighter who is willing to wait on his opponent and counter-punch.

What I am saying is, Hopkins hasn’t had to fight a bigger, more aggressive fighter who was going to take the fight to him and make him work for every second of the round. If you watch Hopkins, his whole game these days is built around being able to completely dictate the pace; in other words, to fight when HE wants to fight, and to do it in spurts. In a way, that’s what you have to do when you are in your forties. When you have an opponent in front of you who cooperates with that; who is willing to sit back and throw a punch here, a punch there, that kind of approach can work.

But I simply don’t see that approach working against Calzaghe. Like I said at the top, Calzaghe is not exactly my kind of fighter. He’s not the type of guy I look at and say, “Boy, he’s an all-time great.” And I don’t think my opinion in that regard is going to change, no matter how this fight turns out. I know that he and Hopkins have had 20 title defenses, and that they held their respective titles for over 10 years. But I think maybe that is more of a commentary on the overall quality of boxing in this day and age. Neither fighter has had to fight one excruciating title defense after another, like the fighters of thirty or forty years ago. You couldn’t tell me for an instant that a Robinson, a Leonard, an Ezzard Charles, couldn’t have cleaned both their clocks, whether it be at 160 or 168 pounds.

But I will say this about Calzaghe - he is an efficient fighter, better than he looks. and he doesn’t have to be good enough to beat Marvin Hagler or Sugar Ray Leonard on Saturday night. he only has to be good enough to beat 43-year-old Bernard Hopkins.

Calzaghe is also busy. Oh, is he ever busy! There is no way on earth that he is going to stand there and let Hopkins dart in and out, running about the ring, winning rounds with three or four punches. He’s just not going to allow it. He will throw a ton of punches, without regard to whether they’re landing on the button, and without regard to what Hopkins may counter with, because at 168 pounds, Hopkins isn’t taking in a lot of power. And he will connect with enough of them to impress the judges with his level of activity. Regardless of whether he is hurting Hopkins, if he is the busier guy, he is going to get the nod on those scorecards.

He simply isn’t going to allow Hopkins to steal this one. To me, the style of Calzaghe is the type that is going to win a fight by a margin, because he doesn’t seem to get very tired. In fact, only two of his championship fights have seen the opponent get to within six points on all three judges’ cards. That’s what we call consistency.

To me, there’s only one result in this one, and that is CALZAGHE BY DECISION.

And what will Bernard say about the white guys THEN?

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Bet the Hopkins-Calzaghe fight at BetUS

BetUS Boxing Betting odds:

Light Heavyweights - 12 Rounds
JOE CALZAGHE -300
BERNARD HOPKINS +220

OVER 11.5 ROUNDS -400
UNDER 11.5 ROUNDS +250