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By Kevin Iole, Yahoo! Sports Dec 15, 6:01 pm EST
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Joe Calzaghe has just finished a year in which he earned about the same amount of money that Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was reportedly seeking in exchange for President-elect Barack *****’s Senate seat.
Yet, Calzaghe not only had the temerity to declare that boxing, the sport that made him rich and (semi-) famous, is dying, but he complained about there being an excessive number of title belts.
On a tour to promote a DVD about his life, Calzaghe whined about the politics in the sport, the proliferation of champions and said he felt the sport was on its way out.
“I think boxing is a dying sport,” Calzaghe told the Associated Press. “Globally – in America, for instance – you’ve got UFC, which has taken a lot off boxing, business-wise.”
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He went on to voice a popular opinion that boxing is plagued by political machinations and said there are too many champions.
While the major sanctioning bodies – the WBC, the WBA, the WBO and the IBF – are hardly good for the sport, Calzaghe is a hypocrite. He was plenty content to stay in the U.K. and hold the WBO super middleweight belt during the latter part of the 20th century and in the early portion of the 21st.
Had he wanted to do something positive for the sport, he would have surrendered that WBO belt at the time, denounced the sanctioning body as corrupt and offered to fight anyone anywhere.
But for much of the time Calzaghe was holding the WBO belt, he didn’t want to fight outside of the U.K. and he was perfectly happy to run off mundane title defenses without thinking of the bigger picture and what would have been best for the sport.
He kept himself largely off-limits to media outside the U.K. and did nothing positive to promote the sport.
That was certainly his right, but it looks classless now that the end of his career is at hand to be speaking out against abuses he could have helped to correct. The sanctioning bodies are rife with corruption. The sport needs a prominent boxer to publicly take them on and lead a campaign to at the least force them to operate more fairly and transparently.
It would have been nice to see Calzaghe in, say, 2002, dump his WBO belt and give up fighting unworthy mandatory challengers in favor of seeking the best fighters in the world, wherever they may have been.
That could have led to fights against Roy Jones Jr. and Bernard Hopkins much earlier than they happened. Calzaghe won a split decision over Hopkins in Las Vegas in April and routed Jones at New York’s Madison Square Garden in November. Hopkins was 43 and Jones 39, clearly not the fighters they were in their primes.
He’s refusing to give Hopkins a rematch, even though Hopkins is willing to fight him in Wales, where a rematch would draw in excess of 50,000 and would garner worldwide attention.
He’s turned up his nose at a bout against exciting WBC super middleweight champion Carl Froch, who has called him out. Froch is from Nottingham, England, and though he’s not well-known in the U.S., a fight between them not only would be an entertaining match but would also be a blockbuster in the U.K.
Calzaghe co-promoted his Nov. 8 fight with Jones. If he were so concerned with the health of boxing, he might have played a stronger role in the promotion and guaranteed a better undercard for the fans who doled out big money to purchase the pay-per-view.
The undercard of that show, which sold slightly less than 250,000 on pay-per-view, was one of the worst in boxing history for a show so expensive. It’s galling that Calzaghe has the chutzpah to remark that the sport is dying when he took the money and ran the way he did instead of putting on a quality show when he became a promoter and had it within his power to do so.
He had the ability to insist on a compelling undercard, but instead chose to line his own pocket rather than make a statement about the way the sport should be run.
You don’t hear Oscar De La Hoya complaining that the sport is dying. His Dec. 6 bout with Manny Pacquiao sold 1.25 million pay-per-view units. Boxing is alive and well for guys like De La Hoya.
It’s easy to squawk about what’s wrong, but it’s more difficult to take the time to try to fix it.
By virtue of his wins over Hopkins and Jones, Calzaghe has become one of the most prominent names in the sport. He commands attention like a Carl Froch never could.
If he doesn’t want to fight again, it’s his choice and certainly a reasonable one. Boxing is a difficult and dangerous sport and no one should compete if they have any ambivalence about it.
Retiring as an active fighter, though, wouldn’t preclude Calzaghe from trying to help the sport that has given him wealth and fame beyond measure.
Instead of complaining that boxing is dying while hawking a DVD about his life story – another way he’s making money off the sport – he ought to lead a campaign to promote the many good things in the sport that are occurring.
If he chooses to fight, he ought to give Hopkins a rematch. It would be a huge event no matter where it occurred and he’d erase any doubts for those who hold them.
If he chooses to fight, he shouldn’t dismiss Froch as beneath him and instead give Froch the opportunity he claims he was denied years earlier by men like Hopkins and Jones.
He’d do all those things if he weren’t so self-centered and so focused on dragging in every last penny he could.
Boxing isn’t dead, nor isn’t it dying.
Its health isn’t being improved, though, by one of its biggest stars.
And that’s a real problem.
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