No Ordinary Joe

It was quiet on the train out of London Paddington. A pile of newspapers lay on the table but I couldn’t concentrate. The pain in my hand and the shit in my head were too intense, I was in no mood for reading. My mobile phone rang and I picked it up to resume a conversation which got interrupted when the train back to Newport entered a tunnel, even though I wasn’t much in the mood for talking either. A Harley Street doctor had just shot cortisone into the carpal bone in my left wrist, which I’d damaged in sparring three weeks ahead of the biggest fight of my life. ‘You won’t be able to punch with the hand for a week,’ he told me. I knew what this meant. No way would I be fighting Jeff Lacy with one good hand, no way. Lacy was twenty-eight-years old and the IBF super middleweight title-holder. He had a 22–0 record and knockout power in both his fists. In America he was being hyped as the second coming of Mike Tyson. He even had the Sports Illustrated ‘Six-Pack of the Year’. Of course, the voice on the other end of the phone didn’t give a monkey’s for his six-pack or his unbeaten record or my doom-and-gloom attitude.

‘You will beat the crap out of Jeff Lacy. Believe me because you don’t believe in yourself. It doesn’t matter about your wrist. It doesn’t matter that you haven’t sparred. Listen to me, it doesn’t fucking matter. You’re going to smash this guy. The guy is nothing but you’re going to be a laughing stock if you cry off with your wrist injury.’

‘Joe, if you’re not going to fight this fight, you might as well retire. You’ll lose all credibility. Lacy won’t come back. He won’t touch you. You’ll be damaged goods. You are going to be a laughing stock. You won’t get another big fight for the rest of your career. This is your fight, and this is going to make you. If you fight this fight, you’ll get respect. Win it and you will have everything you ever wanted to achieve from the time you first put on a pair of boxing gloves. Even if you lose, people will respect you for fighting the guy. You need to fight this fight or you know what people will remember you as? They’ll remember you as a fucking chicken. Is that what you want?’

Sometimes I get up in the morning and I ask myself, ‘Why am I doing this? Why am I in boxing? I don’t want to box. I’m bored with it all. I really don’t want to do this any more.’ The politics makes boxing a shit sport and it can be horribly cruel. I can’t believe that Muhammad Ali was allowed to fight against Larry Holmes and Trevor Berbick in his last two fights. I watched him being interviewed by Michael Parkinson after the Holmes fight and his words were heavy and slurred. He didn’t sound like the Ali the whole world had come to know. And he still had one more fight. How sickening is that? When I listen to Evander Holyfield speak I feel sad. Holyfield won the world heavyweight championship, regained it and he’s made over £100 million in his career. Yet, at the age of forty-four, he’s still boxing, continuing to get his head punched in, and I listen to him speak in interviews and his words are slurred. Why is he doing it? How can he be allowed to box when we know what happened to Ali and countless others who fought too long? Will they let him fight until he’s walking and talking like Ali? In ten years’ time Holyfield might not know his own name.

Mickey Duff once told me a story about Joe Bugner. He was sitting in a sauna back at his hotel after challenging Ali for the world heavyweight title and Mickey asked him why he hadn’t really tried to win, he had only tried to survive. ‘Making the money is one thing,’ Joe replied. ‘Then I’ve got to be able to count it.’ When I’m retired I want to be able to do the same.

Would I retire now if I was financially secure? Possibly. I don’t miss boxing when I’m not fighting. I don’t miss the training. It’s the boredom that gets the better of me. I miss doing ‘something’, and the reality is that I’ve been doing this since I was eight years old. What else am I going to do? Boxing is what I know. When I’m in training and my weight is down I love it. I love running up and down the hills I’ve trained on since I was a boy, building up my fitness and stamina. I love going about my work in the gym and hitting the bags and the pads. Bah-bah-bah-bah-bah. The sound, the smell, the sweat dripping onto the floor, this is who I am. This is me. I find myself when I’m in the ring. I find contentment. It’s what I’m good at and it gives me satisfaction knowing that I can make other people happy too. My kids are especially proud. Connor, my youngest son, says to me, ‘Dad, I don’t want you to retire. I want you always to be world champion.’ As far as he’s concerned, I’m the best fighter in the world. Superman.

But I don’t always think about winning. I could lose, and that’s what I think about which is why I’ve pulled out of fights when I felt that, with the injuries, I was leaving myself with too much to do. I wanted to pull out of the fight with Lacy. I didn’t want to fight him. My hand was gone and I was convinced there was no way I could box with one hand. I could get battered. That’s when my dad’s psychology came into play. He’s been my trainer since the day I first put on a pair of boxing gloves. He’s also a great judge of fights and fighters. He’s my best pal, a total pain in the arse sometimes but I love him to bits. He knew exactly what was going on in my head and he laid everything on the line.

‘It was one of those fights – even if Joe had lost, just the fact that he went in the ring would have been an achievement. Not getting in there would have destroyed his career. He would have had no legacy. He had performed badly in recent fights. He had also pulled out of fights twice or three times. Now Lacy? People are gullible and they would have drawn their own conclusions. Joe’s unbeaten record would have meant nothing. This was the fight he needed to leave people with no option but to recognise that he’s a special fighter. He had no choice. “Pull out of the fight and you’ll be a laughing stock for the rest of your life,” I told him. “Whether you get knocked out or not, it doesn’t matter. Just by fighting him, you’re proving all that you need to prove. If you’re not in that ring on 4 March, you’re history. But believe me, Joe Calzaghe will always fight a good fight. You’re good enough to destroy this guy. Box your fight, you’ll destroy him because he’s just Jeff Lacy, a guy who is made for you. From the first round you’ll out-think this guy and you’ll outbox him. It will be the easiest fight of your career. He has to go through five different moves just to throw one punch because he’s so muscle-bound and laboured but you can throw five punches in one single movement. It will be easy, Joe, believe me.” I had a few of these conversations with him and so did Frank Warren. Barry McGuigan came down to the gym to film some footage for ITV and he told him the same. Eventually, it began to sink in.’ – Enzo Calzaghe

Four days before the fight we travelled to Manchester by train. That morning I woke up, looked out across the garden and saw a blanket of snow outside. Suddenly, I had this very calm feeling. I love snow, always have since I was a kid, and the scene outside that morning convinced me this was my destiny. Throughout the build-up I’d been nervous. I wasn’t sleeping well. I tried to get my body clock adjusted to the scheduled time of the first bell, so I was staying awake until 2 a.m. I’d train for an hour and go to bed, hoping to wake up again at midday. But it never worked out that way. I was waking up at 8 a.m., unable to get back to sleep, then I was becoming knackered from trying to stay awake at night, but I just couldn’t stay in bed any morning past nine. I woke up dreaming about the fight and I was worried. Yet on the morning we set out for Manchester this total calm came over me. All of my demons were gone. I was totally relaxed. It was like every bit of pressure was taken off me. My dad couldn’t believe how calm I was. Normally, I’m uptight in the days before a fight but the two of us played cards on the train with my uncle Sergio and joked and laughed all the way into Manchester Piccadilly. It was as if we were going on our holidays.

Winning is everything, it’s all that matters to me. This is why I’ve made my career in boxing. I could have earned more money if I had fought in the Nigel Benn and Chris Eubank era in the early 1990s but I could have taken some beatings then too. Look at what happened to Michael Watson, and to Gerald McClellan and the state Benn was in after his savage fight with McClellan at the London Arena, pissing blood, unable to get out of a bathtub without being helped. I wouldn’t want to be in a fight like that or in some of the wars Eubank was in. I haven’t had the same rivalry but only because I’ve proved myself to be so much better than everyone else in the super middleweight division in the past decade.

To me, boxing is a sport. I don’t step in the ring to damage my health or to do damage to someone else. I have no desire to come out pissing blood just so I can say that I fought in a war. I’ve had hard fights, I’ve had to go down in the trenches. Eubank gave me hell for twelve rounds, but I don’t fight to get beaten up. I don’t fight to get hit with a thousand punches on my head just so I can say, ‘Look at what a hard man I am.’ What does that mean? What kind of boast is that? The reason I fight is simple: I like to win. I see boxing as an art. Hit and not be hit. Yes, I can take a hard punch to the chin, I’ve been cut and I’ve been knocked down, but I would never quit. I have the heart of a fighter. I don’t crave to be in a war, however, for the sake of being in a war. It is simply about winning.

People would look sometimes and say, ‘There’s Joe Calzaghe in another shit fight,’ without knowing the circumstances. They didn’t think about the psychological problems of going through a divorce as I’m in the ring struggling and getting knocked down by Kabery Salem. They didn’t realise that my hands were so bad that I wasn’t able to spar for fights against David Starie, Rick Thornberry and Robin Reid. I won those fights and I’m proud of those wins. Fighters like Charles Brewer, Byron Mitchell, Richie Woodhall were all world champions. They were former world champions when I fought them and in some people’s minds that’s what seemed to count but your destiny is not always in your hands. Did I want to fight Robin Reid when he held the WBC super middleweight belt? Of course I did. I was screaming for the fight but Reid didn’t want it and then he was beaten by Sugarboy Malinga. The belt rapidly changed hands between Woodhall, Markus Beyer and finally Glen Catley, whose promoter, Chris Sanigar, said he didn’t even want Catley to spar me, never mind fight me. This is what can happen in boxing and, for me, that always left something missing, a single fight to look back on to show everybody exactly who I am. I needed the right opponent to prove myself and, finally, get the public acclaim.

It was frustrating that fights against Roy Jones and Bernard Hopkins, two of the great names in and around my weight division, never happened. I was too dangerous for my own good and I began to think that I would never get my career-defining fight. The fight with Hopkins was actually agreed in 2002 but he pulled out and I got used to that kind of disappointment. It seemed I wasn’t a big enough name in America for the likes of Jones and Hopkins to take the risk. I accepted it but I always hoped that the recognition would come eventually. I used to look at my situation and compare it to Marvelous Marvin Hagler, a great champion who didn’t have his biggest fights against Roberto Duran, Tommy Hearns and Sugar Ray Leonard until he was in his thirties. The same with Hopkins. His situation was similar to mine. He was a long-reigning title-holder in the middleweight division, not really given a lot of credit. He’d never beaten any great fighters until well into his thirties when he got big fights against Felix Trinidad and Oscar De La Hoya and won them both. So I realised, as I reached my thirties, that there was still hope. All I could do was fight and keep winning.

I established myself as the legitimate world champion at super middleweight. The WBO title, which I won from Eubank, may be considered the least of the four major belts in America but the fighter makes the belt. I’ve defended against six world champions and I’ve outlasted the fighters who won other belts during my reign. What more could I have done? Yet until Lacy came across from America I was never given my dues. Maybe I needed to feel fear to bring out my best. I wasn’t scared of Lacy but I was fearful of what he could do. This was a fight I could really lose and the fear of defeat spurred me on. It was the fear of losing and the pain that would bring. Every time I was defeated as an amateur I cried. It hurt me that bad. I hope I wouldn’t cry now that I’m a grown man but even today I would be crushed by defeat. Failure is a horrible feeling and the fear of failure motivates me. I don’t fear anything about getting hurt, that’s nothing, it goes with the territory. I just don’t think that it’s all right to fail. It’s not about what other people think. It’s about how I feel. I know that almost everybody will lose some time and there’s no shame in that but I’m a winner. This is who I am. Every person has to be honest and true to himself or herself and the one thing I would hate above anything else is being in a fight in which I didn’t give my all. That’s why I was so concerned about the injury to my wrist. That’s why I didn’t want to fight. I didn’t want to beat myself. I wouldn’t be able to live with that.

Every man who climbs through the ropes into a boxing ring deserves respect. From the journeyman who fights in the small halls to the guy whose name goes up in lights on the Strip in Las Vegas, anybody who has that courage to do what we do. Some fighters fall and we say that they swallowed it but I can’t judge them. They have mortgages to pay and children to feed. Maybe they’re being clever by not take a beating, but I’m a different creature. I’m a champion. I’d have to be nailed to the floor because my nature is to fight to the end. I have a tremendous amount of belief in myself but before every single fight I think about the big ‘what if’. What if I lost?

Three weeks before stepping into the ring with Lacy I went out for a meal in Cardiff with my girlfriend, Jo-Emma. I had tested my wrist that day and it was knackered. I’d had the injection but I still couldn’t punch and I told myself that I wouldn’t be fighting. I drank a bottle of wine with my meal, came home and had another glass.

The next day I didn’t train and I told my dad that I wasn’t fighting. ‘I’m not fighting. I’m not going to fight this guy and risk everything,’ I said. I felt that I needed to be 100 per cent. ‘This is meant to be my hardest week of sparring and I haven’t sparred. I can’t even punch the bags.’ My wrist was hurting and I sent my sparring partners home. There was no way back.

For some reason I still went jogging at 2 a.m. on Kendon Hill, five miles in the freezing cold, the ground all covered in snow. My dad followed me in his car with the fog lights turned on. ‘You are fitter than you’ve ever been, Joe,’ he shouted out. ‘You will beat this guy.’ I wasn’t listening but I ran at the same time the next night and again the night after that, through the snow with my dad following me. ‘Just be Joe Calzaghe,’ he shouted. ‘Joe Calzaghe and Jeff Lacy will not even be a contest.’

In the evenings I was watching tapes of Lacy, rewinding them over and over, watching this guy destroy Scott Pemberton in two rounds and knock Robin Reid through the ropes. In my mind I was building him up into the bloody Predator but I was underestimating myself and making Lacy into something more than he was. ‘I watched one of those Lacy fights last night too,’ my dad would say. ‘Two rounds, that was enough. Then I took out the tape and I put on Joe Calzaghe and I had a smile on my face. Joe, you are going to pin this boy against the wall. It will be the easiest fight you’ve ever had.’

I still hadn’t sparred. The last time I didn’t spar properly was ahead of my fights with Reid, Thornberry and Starie and I looked awful. Then I got a sparring partner in two weeks before the fight, my last week of training, to do some light work. My wrist wasn’t 100 per cent. It wasn’t even 75 per cent but it was OK. So I made up for the week of sparring that I missed three weeks before the bout. I did six or eight rounds a day but it was light, almost tap-sparring. I didn’t want to risk my wrist because it was still sore and I was still stressed. This horrible anxiety had built up because I felt that I wasn’t ready and I thought that Lacy was going to eat me up if I wasn’t prepared. I thought I would fail. I was making things worse than they really were.

I’ve said to Joe many times that getting him in the ring is a real pain but when he’s in the ring he’s an animal. They would have to kill him to beat him. Then it’s not a problem. But getting him in there can be a big problem. – Enzo Calzaghe

The thought of losing was making me feel ill. Everything I had worked for my whole life was riding on this fight. I sparred every day of that week, two weeks out from the fight, just tapping with my left hand because I couldn’t punch hard but at least I was able to throw it. I wrapped loads of tape around it, so that I almost had a cast underneath my glove. Slowly the hand improved and so did my head.

Joe Calzaghe is a disgrace. I don’t believe this injury is leg it. He never, ever wanted to fight Jeff Lacy. I suspected all along that Calzaghe didn’t want any of this. I never thought they’d fight us, I always suspected it was all a bluff. There are some fighters who are willing to fight anyone, any time, and there are fighters who just don’t fit in that warrior category. Joe Calzaghe is one of the latter.

Showtime, the American cable TV network which broadcast the fight in the United States, thought they had another Tyson on their hands and Lacy reckoned he would just turn up and walk right through me. He came to Manchester with a false sense of security, then something hit him. We came face to face at the pre-fight press conference and he saw my confidence and suddenly he was faced with the truth. He could sense at that moment the size of his task. He wasn’t in Florida any more with Gary Shaw tapping him on his back and all his homies and friends telling him, ‘You’re the man!’ He was in a bloody cold city in the north of England a long way from home where no one gave a shit about Jeff Lacy, me least of all. I knew what I had to do, I had to step up to the plate on the most important night of my life. It didn’t matter that I was going to pull out less than three weeks before the fight because I’d injured my hand. It didn’t matter that I’d actually made the decision and had to be talked round by my dad. None of that was relevant. The only thing that people were going to take away from this was how I did. A whole career came down to one fight. A lesser man might have crumbled under the pressure, but I produced the performance of my life. I did it when the chips were down, and not many people can say that.

All who watched Calzaghe outspeed, outthink and punishingly outbox the American through every one of 12 rounds had no option – regardless of how far the ability to make comparisons stretched into the past – but to recognise what they were seeing as one of the greatest displays of superb technique, confidence and fighting intelligence a British boxer has delivered in a major contest. Lacy came in with the IBF title and a reputation for overwhelming aggression. He left chastened, knowing and cruelly persuaded that the unbeaten 33-year-old who had tormented him is the best 12-stone fighter in the world.

Some people told me it was the best night of their lives and doors suddenly opened for me. I was even asked to compete on Strictly Come Dancing shortly afterwards, but that’s not me. I’m not into the celebrity scene and going to big movie premieres. I’m a boxer, a guy from the Welsh valleys. That’s not to say I lock myself in solitude, I socialise but I don’t go out of my way to be seen. Being seen with this person or that person just doesn’t interest me. I’m not into being a superstar. I’m just a champion fighter. That’s all that matters to me. When people get the two confused, that’s when they mess up and get distracted. I keep my feet on the ground, I live in the same area in which I grew up and I train like I’ve always trained. I train like the challenger, even after twenty title defences, because every fight is still another challenge to me.

When I stick that gumshield in my mouth and they ring the bell it’s all about pride. I have a ferocious will not to get beaten and that’s what keeps driving me. You have to be a special sort of person to be undefeated for seventeen years in any discipline, especially boxing, but this is what I was born to do and sometimes it seems like it was all mapped out for me.