Published by on April 20th, 2008
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By Charles Jay
Put this story in a time capsule.
I don’t know how they’ll be writing about this fight fifty years from now, when it will be reduced to a couple of lines in a record book (okay, and maybe some video clip on YouTube). Will there even BE a sport of boxing fifty years from now? Not if this is the best the sport has to offer from this point on, I can assure you.
I wasn’t expecting anything scintillating. But this was downright sloppy.
Joe Calzaghe, the undefeated super middleweight champion, was being hailed as perhaps the world’s pound-for-pound best. If that’s the case, we’re all in trouble. But here’s the funny thing – he probably is.
And we probably are.
Look – if Calzaghe couldn’t make a better showing against a 43-year-old fighter who can barely put together a combination, then you need to hold off on all the hyperbole.
You could spin a story about how remarkable Bernard Hopkins is, I guess, to even get into a ring and be competitive at that age, and having won those fights against Tito Trinidad, Oscar De La Hoya, Antonio Tarver and Winky Wright, and taking Calzaghe to a split decision, all after the age of 37.
And Jim Lampley, who really believes Hopkins is one of the five greatest middleweights of all-time, can continue to mythologize about the “almost mathematical approach” Hopkins takes in laying out his “meticulous” game plan.
But allow me to do some simple math for a moment. Let’s see, in his last five fights, Hopkins has won two and lost three.
As for more involved numbers, the judges didn’t seem to add things up the right way for him either.
I don’t know that there is anything wrong with those guys, but maybe Hopkins needs to take a remedial course of “arithmetic.”
But is Calzaghe much better? Not really. Yes, he’s shown quite a bit of efficiency in the past, and demonstrated some resiliency in getting up from the canvas and coming from behind on Saturday night. But he’s just very limited. As Emmanuel Steward pointed out on the telecast, he throws a lot of amateurish slaps.
And when a guy shows up like Hopkins, whose sole purpose, it seems, is to make him look bad, he’s going to do just that. Calzaghe is not enough of a fighter to overcome it. Sadly, those kind of fighters don’t exist in abundance anymore. It’s a sad state indeed.
For those of you who are either new or lacking in much background – and I include most boxing “media” in this, which is sad in itself – why don’t you pull up the Calzaghe-Hopkins fight, between fighters who have had about 40 title defenses between them, in your HBO On Demand, then after that, watch a tape of the second Sugar Ray Leonard-Thomas Hearns fight, a super middleweight fight between two guys who were past their prime. Then tell me if you don’t see a real difference in quality. If you can’t, just contact me and I’ll be happy to help you with it.
I did this exercise once with a would-be writer as a fight as unfolding between Riddick Bowe and Jorge Luis Gonzalez, a former Pan Am Games champion who beat Bowe and Lennox Lewis on consecutive nights in that tournament. Bowe was serviceable, to be sure, and had plenty of ability. Many had hailed him as a sensational fighter, and this writer in particular thought he might have been successful against some of the better heavyweights of all time. Not that he had SEEN some of the best heavyweights of all time, but hey – this guy had “Jim Lampley disease,” in that boxing, for him, started the first time he turned on a TV set, so he was going to make the comparison anyway.
Well, after Bowe’s fight, I put in a tape of the first Ali-Frazier fight, and I asked him to ponder what he had been saying. Suffice it to say the issue was never brought up again.
And while I’m on a roll, let me make one more unfavorable comparison between Hopkins and a great from the past. When Roberto Duran did his “No Mas” thing against Leonard in their rematch, at least he had the decency to quit. Hopkins decided instead to insult our intelligence. The “all-time great” doubled over and fell like a baby, going into all kinds of histrionics and looking very much like a fighter who wanted the easy way out, when hit with a ‘punch” just below the belt line from Calzaghe that appeared to have been thrown with no force whatsoever (even Calzaghe couldn’t recall that punch in the post-fight interview).
He used it to get five minutes’ rest when I suppose he felt he needed it, and was also, I’m convinced, looking for a disqualification of his opponent. He wasn’t successful in that quest, so he then continued with the fight, only to do the exact same thing shortly thereafter!
Later on, he looked pathetic trying to explain to the HBO interviewer how damaging that “punch” was, while at the same time claiming he wasn’t hurt at all during the fight.
All of this was ridiculous, and of course it’s not the end. Hopkins claims to have been robbed, so he’s not likely to go away. And since the ersatz belt these guys were fighting for is owned lock, stock and barrel by a company Hopkins holds a partnership interest in (along with Oscar De La Hoya), don’t discount that he’ll find a way to get that belt back, without having to absorb any blows at all – high, low or otherwise.
