CALZAGHE RETIRES!

Calzaghe goes out on his terms
By Kevin Iole, Yahoo! Sports
Feb 5, 4:34 pm EST

Bernard Hopkins is undoubtedly an angry man today. And Chad Dawson surely can’t be too happy. Nor, one would imagine, are Carl Froch, Glen Johnson and Jermain Taylor.

That disparate group of boxers shared a desire for a fight against Joe Calzaghe, who foiled them all on Thursday as he had 46 opponents when he announced his retirement from boxing.

The long-time super middleweight champion and The Ring light heavyweight champion spent the past couple of months deciding whether he wanted to fight any more.

After waxing Roy Jones Jr. at Madison Square Garden in November, Calzaghe improved his record to 46-0 and unquestionably established himself as one of the greats of the current era.

Hopkins was desperate for a rematch of their April 19 bout, which Calzaghe won by split decision. Dawson, the unbeaten IBF light heavyweight champion, had hoped a fight with, and a victory over, Calzaghe would establish him as one of the game’s elite.

Froch won the super middleweight title that Calzaghe relinquished when he moved to light heavyweight and began campaigning for a bout that would have been huge in the United Kingdom.

Calzaghe considered those possibilities, but he chose to walk away. He walks away with his faculties, his reputation and, of course, that unbeaten record.

He was a target because of his success, because potential opponents knew they could increase their own stature by defeating him.
And many of those men will speak disdainfully of him for walking away, questioning his courage, his heart and his manhood for not accepting another challenge. They’ll point to the fact that, in a similar situation a little more than a decade ago, Calzaghe whined about Steve Collins’ decision to retire rather than to face him.

Just like Collins had little to gain by facing a relatively unknown Calzaghe in 1997, so, too, does the nearly 37-year-old Calzaghe have little to gain by fighting again.

He’s not going to burnish his reputation, regardless of whether he became the first man to stop Hopkins or the first man to defeat Dawson.

“I thought long and hard about things, but I’ve decided to retire from boxing,” Calzaghe told the BBC, which broke the news of his retirement. “It was a difficult decision, but I’ve achieved everything I’ve wanted to achieve in boxing.”

He was 22-0 in world championship bouts, held the super middleweight belt for more than 10 years and was rarely challenged.

He could have pursued a rematch with Hopkins, that would have paid him millions, but there was no upside other than money in that fight for him.

Had he chosen to stick around, he inevitably would have lost. The reason why there are so few boxers who have retired undefeated is that most stay long past their primes. They fight when they’re only a shell of the man that the fans once knew.

Exhibit A in the modern era, of course, is former heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield, who is almost pitiable the way he’s hanging on.

Even defeating a young and skilled fighter like Dawson would have done little for Calzaghe’s reputation. After a closing stretch in which he routed the previously unbeaten Jeff Lacy and Mikkel Kessler and then knocked off a pair of icons in Hopkins and Jones, nothing Calzaghe could have done after defeating Jones would have impacted the perception of him.

He’ll suffer because he fought Hopkins when Hopkins was 43 and not in his prime. He’ll suffer because he faced Jones five years after Jones had become just another boxer.

Whether it was his fault that those fights didn’t happen earlier or not, questions will always surround him whether he was good enough to have beaten them in their primes.

He told the BBC that his greatest accomplishment was finishing his career unbeaten, noting he hadn’t lost since July 1990, when he was an amateur.

“I fought some great fights, against some great fighters, and to do that is beyond my wildest dreams,” Calzaghe said. “Like I said, it was just incredible.”

He did everything correctly during his professional career. He came ready to fight, he always came in shape and, more often than not, he was highly entertaining.

He’s a first-ballot Hall of Famer and will go down as, arguably, the greatest fighter in British boxing history.

In his autobiography, “No Ordinary Joe,” he writes of his satisfaction of his lopsided victory over Lacy in 2006.

“I love to hear people say to me, ‘That was a great fight,’ ” Calzaghe wrote. “It’s nice and it doesn’t happen all the time because in some of my fights, I’ve been ordinary. But it’s always the first thing I ask my Dad: ‘Was it a good fight?’ I didn’t realize how good my performance was until I overhead some people talking as I walked out of the ring.

“Was I really that good, Dad?”

His father, Enzo, who taught him to box and served as his trainer for his entire career, was speaking of the Lacy fight, but perfectly captured his son’s career when he answered, “You were brilliant, Joe. (Expletive) brilliant.”

All those fighters who are angry that Calzaghe is stepping away would even have to grudgingly admit that.

When he stepped between the ropes, Joe Calzaghe was brilliant.

(Expletive) brilliant.