If November 8, 2008 was the last time Joe Calzaghe stepped into a ring, he picked a hell of a way to go out.
In only his second career fight in the U.S., Calzaghe again wowed the American crowd with another technical marvel of a performance out boxing Roy Jones Jr. so bad that many have now called into question Jones’ future as well.
The irony in Calzaghe’s domination is that, like in his dominating win against Bernard Hopkins, Calzaghe was knocked down in the first round for the second time in the U.S. in as many fights.
Despite the fact that the two were almost identical in their punching efficiency despite Calzaghe throwing nearly 1,000 punches, it was his ability to land over 100 more jabs (Jones landed only 12 the whole fight) and nearly 100 more power punches than Jones that made the fight a blowout despite it looking close in the opening rounds.
Calzaghe’s methodical destruction of Jones was all the more visual as Calzaghe opened a big cut above Jones’ left eye in the fifth round and the blood would not stop flowing for the rest of the fight. From the seventh round on, a ringside doctor examined the eye before each round to determine if the fight should continue.
To Jones’ credit, he never wanted the fight to stop.
The fifth round was Jones’ best of the fight as the fire and the power that was ultimately lost in the fight as a whole was present for those three minutes giving fans at Madison Square Garden the best round of the fight.
Maybe it was the fact that there wasn’t any animosity going into this fight, as opposed to the Hopkins fight, because this was a totally different Joe Calzaghe than we saw against Hopkins and for that matter than people have known for basically his whole career. Maybe it was knowing that these may in fact be his final rounds in the ring, but Calzaghe seemed to be a businessman having fun in the ring on this night as opposed to a businessman with a task at hand. Calzaghe still got the job done and then some, but there was a lot more showboating and swagger than anyone who has seen Calzaghe in the past is used to seeing; it even seemed in the later rounds that Calzaghe was channeling Sugar Ray Leonard with the windup before throwing a punch and the gyrating of his body in between punches both thrown by him and at him. And most surreal from Calzaghe was throughout the fight he would lean in almost touching his head to Jones’ chest begging Roy to hit him and to show him that he wasn’t inflicting any real damage. I will use the word cocky to describe the behavior, but at the end of the night there was no ill feeling between the two about these actions, so I will go further to say that maybe Calzaghe was having fun in the ring for the first time instead of just being a man on a mission with that mission being the win.
What’s next in the light heavyweight division is a bit of a mystery with the careers of these two fighters very much in question. I don’t believe that this is it for Calzaghe despite him saying this fight probably would be it. There is now too much money out there after an American debut year that has seen him demolish two legends in the sport. Hopkins with his beating of Pavlik is right back in the picture, as a rematch with Calzaghe should seem very temping for Golden Boy or whoever would promote it. A possible Jones/Hopkins rematch would also be tempting as the half a million buys for the Jones/Trinidad dream match should show that there is money to be made in dream matches in boxing as well as MMA. With Calzaghe, should he choose to continue fighting, there’s the Hopkins rematch, and even Jermain Taylor is likely to be in the works with Taylor’s renewed star power and Calzaghe’s newfound star power in America.
There were references to the final LaMotta/Robinson fight—the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre”—near the end of this fight and while not as brutal as the fight itself or how Martin Scorsese portrayed it in “Raging Bull,” this fight did have the elements of that fight. There was an older, but still technically proficient fighter (Calzaghe) taking on a past his prime warrior (Jones) and it was clear early who was going to win and who was the better fighter in the ring on that particular night as Jones spent around three quarters of this fight just absorbing punishment without mounting a serious comeback. But, like LaMotta, he never went down and never quit.
While Jones’ place in history will always be debated because of the move to heavyweight, his downward spiral over a few years at the turn of the century, his entertaining comeback, having not always faced the best competition, etc., this was the night when Roy Jones made the transition from Roy Jones the boxer to Roy Jones the warrior. While he never had a chance in the fight past round three, that didn’t stop him from persevering, from not quitting, and from not at least trying. He was simply in the ring with a much better fighter, but that fact was lost on him. He was there for the long hall and showed that fighting spirit in the face of a task to Herculean for him at this point in his career. Whether he fights again or not, I think that Jones’ legacy should’ve been sealed in this beating: a man who acted professional in the face of a bad loss and a man who took that loss and everything that came with it in stride.
As for Calzaghe, at 46-0, his legacy should be sealed too. Most were skeptical about his never having fought in the U.S. prior to this year, but his ten-year reign at the top of the super middleweight division should speak for itself. His 21 successful title defenses should also speak for itself as his reign in years and defenses ranks second only to Joe Louis’ famous world heavyweight title reign.
The biggest example of Calzaghe’s ability and legacy should be this: prior to 2008 only boxing insiders and die hard boxing fans knew who he was, at the end of 2008, everyone who watched boxing knew who Joe Calzaghe was.
Calzaghe 8 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 118
Jones Jr. 10 9 9 9 10 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 110
