No Ordinary Joe

Someone called it the ‘The Curse’ and maybe that’s the best way to describe the problem with my hands, for it struck again to threaten my superfight with Lacy, which was scheduled to take place on 5 November 2005. Evans Ashira’s only claim to fame was that he had boxed for the vacant WBA middleweight title but lost in the second round. He was strong and squat and had a style of bending right down into a crouch that made him about three foot tall, virtually a dwarf. I could hardly hit the guy.

Then in the fourth round I threw a left uppercut which landed on the top of his head and at the moment of impact I knew my hand was completely gone. From my schoolboy days, I’d been protecting my left hand with loads of bandaging so that I could use it to punch. I’d had it operated on and I’d nursed it through a succession of fights when all I could do was slap with my left glove, just to score points, but this was the worst injury I’d ever suffered, pure agony. Whenever we clinched the pain was like a bolt of electricity shooting through my hand and up my arm. I couldn’t throw the left hand at all, I just had to use my right, grit my teeth and suffer. The metacarpal bone was broken and I had to box for eight rounds more. How many fighters could win a fight one-handed? Some people in the crowd started booing and I was frustrated by their reaction but I understand that a lot of people didn’t realise the extent of my injury. I could hear the boos, though I was winning convincingly, but this didn’t satisfy some people. The mentality in Germany is different. Watching Sven Ottke box was like watching paint dry but every punch he threw – and he only threw about six per round – he was cheered to the rafters. He won, that’s what mattered, and the German crowd appreciated a winner. I felt like taking the ring microphone between rounds and saying, ‘Excuse me, ladies and gentleman but I have a slight problem in that my left hand is fucked,’ but I got on with it and did the best job I could with the tools I was given. If I’d been fighting Lacy that night, he would probably have won.

The real frustration was that it became a crap fight after I’d boxed well in the first few rounds and I’m sure I would have stopped him if the hand hadn’t gone. Luckily, the fracture was clean and neat because I hadn’t punched any more with it. If I’d continued to throw punches, the doctors would probably have had to operate. All they did was put on a cast and tell me to keep it elevated. I had a holiday booked in the Caribbean, one of those all-inclusive packages, flying out on the Monday but I couldn’t go. I was in agony with my hand and I couldn’t sleep for two days. I tried to get the dates changed on the insurance but couldn’t do it because I’m a boxer. They said I was fighting, so they wouldn’t pay out and I lost quite a bit of money, missed the holiday and now the Lacy fight was off.

Calzaghe was last night accused of ducking a multimillion pound world super middleweight unification clash against Jeff Lacy. The WBO champion broke his left hand as he laboured to a points win over journeyman Evans Ashira in Cardiff on Saturday. It forced him to cancel a November 5 clash with IBF king Lacy, bringing a furious rap from the American. Lacy said: ‘Calzaghe damaged his left hand? I think he is trying to worm his way out of the fight between me and him. Is he really hurt? There is a track record of Calzaghe pulling out of fights. I was afraid this would happen and those fears have come true.’ Plans were well advanced for Calzaghe to get the fight he had been demanding. A press conference with Lacy was staged in Manchester six weeks ago. Lacy’s promotor Gary Shaw was due in London next week to finalise plans. But Calzaghe’s hand, injured in the sixth round, will remain in plaster for a month. Lacy added: ‘I don’t think he should have taken the fight against Ashira. Why take that kind of risk when a big fight, no, a HUGE fight was already agreed? Now it seems as if I might have to go in another direction.’ Shaw was even more scathing. He raged: ‘Calzaghe wanted a way out and he has found it. He and his promoter Frank Warren no longer tell us where and when to fight. They had better get their passports ready because now it will be in the USA.’

Frank Warren sent a photographer into my dressing room to take a picture of the injury so that he could email it out to Florida but I was annoyed that I should have to explain myself. I’m sure that neither Lacy nor Gary Shaw, on examining the evidence, considered picking up the phone to say, ‘Poor Joe, you were right, we’re sorry,’ but I still believed that the fight would happen. Lacy went on to destroy Scott Pemberton on 5 November instead and looked pretty good, though Pemberton was fragile, the perfect opponent for Showtime TV to be building up their new Mike Tyson.

Sometimes I’ll be on the pads, hitting them sweetly, bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah, feeling beautiful, like a million dollars. My dad really brings it out of me on those days. He’ll get the pads out because he knows I’m on form, that I want to do it and he’ll say, ‘Bah-bah-bah,’ as I’m hitting them and make me feel good. ‘You’re brilliant today,’ he’ll say. He always tells me when I look brilliant and never tells me when I’m bad. When I’m bad he knows it’s because I’m not in the mood and he’s going to have a fight if he says anything, but he knows, more than anyone, that when I’m myself no one can beat me. That’s why he was more confident than me for the Lacy fight. He knew what I could do but sometimes I don’t realise my own capabilities. I lack confidence. Considering everything I’ve done, I’m not really a confident guy. This is a good thing, for it causes me to worry about my opponents. I should walk straight through some of them but this is a dangerous mentality to develop because it breeds complacency and complacency often leads to a bad night down the line. The night I stepped into the ring with Lacy I felt like the gladiator who goes in the arena, kneels down and rubs sand through his fingers. I’d gone through all the nerves and negativity, all the fears and worries, so I was able to look myself in the mirror and say, ‘Lacy’s been brought here for you and you know what has to be done, just do it.’

The signals from Lacy were a little different and I took heart from them, for example from seeing him by his girlfriend’s side all the time. You shouldn’t need to have your girlfriend constantly by your side when you’re near a fight. I know that I never want to see Jo-Emma the day of the fight or even the day before. I don’t think it’s good to be with your girlfriend when you’re trying to build a different kind of mindset, but Lacy was with his, holding hands as she mollycoddled him at the weigh-in when he appeared to be subdued, kind of melancholy. Wherever he was, she was. When I went over to do a Showtime press conference in November, four months before the fight, at Times Square in New York, she was there. When we had a conference call on the telephone with the media she was there. Coming off the plane at Manchester airport, she was there, and even at training she was there. The night of the fight I saw him on a TV monitor arriving into the arena and he was hand in hand with his girlfriend, which wasn’t really the sort of entrance to intimidate. We were fighters about to go into battle and, to me, it’s just too comfortable to be arriving hand in hand with your girlfriend. It makes you relaxed and takes your mind off the job. When you go in the ring you’re going to hurt somebody. You don’t need to be angry or too psyched up. I’m always calm and I have that cold-eyed state of mind. When I’m in the ring I know what’s about to happen and I like the guys around me, guys who know boxing, to have a laugh. But I took Lacy’s demeanour and the fact that he and his girlfriend were holding hands coming into the arena as a sign of weakness. The cameras followed them into his dressing room and I watched them sit down in a corner, all loved up. I was hoping they might keep it going and maybe she’d take away all his strength a few minutes before the fight.

Maybe it meant nothing but, as a fighter, you always like to pick up on some sign of weakness in the opponent: looking away when we do the head-to-head staredown; not very assertive in his answers to the press; a bit pensive in how he says everything. These little things give you confidence and when he looked at me at the weigh-in, then looked away, I could tell that he wasn’t 100 per cent. He was tight going into the fight because all the pressure was on him. It was the first time he would face a fighter who’d been a champion for nine years and the roles were reversed. Suddenly, he wasn’t the main man, he was in Manchester, my place, and the crowd were amazing. Their support and some of the things I’d seen around Lacy encouraged me greatly and I felt like I’d won the fight before the bell was even rung.

If body language counts for anything at pre-fight press conferences, the dour demeanour of the normally affable Jeff Lacy, when he faced the media alongside Joe Calzaghe in a Manchester hotel yesterday, suggests he is feeling the pressure before their world super middleweight title unification fight at the MEN Arena in the early hours of Sunday morning. Lacy, 28, the IBF champion, had earlier refused to appear with Calzaghe on the set of Coronation Street for a series of publicity shots to be shown on last night’s ITV News and in selected newspapers. He was then close to monosyllabic in his response to questions after his rotund promoter Gary Shaw described him as a cross between Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield and as ‘the most exciting boxer in the world’. By contrast Calzaghe, 33, who is now quoted as an 11–10 outsider by the bookmakers for the division’s biggest fight since Roy Jones Jr faced James Toney 11 years ago, seemed relaxed and showed a confidence befitting a man who has been the WBO champion since 1997 and is about to figure in his 19th world title contest . . . Lacy restricted himself to a ‘we’ll see in the ring on Saturday’ style of publicity which has proved a frustration to would-be interviewers since he arrived in Britain last week. The American, who is undefeated in 21 fights, was at least lucid when asked about the effect of Calzaghe’s huge level of support. ‘It doesn’t worry me. I’ve always been the underdog,’ he said. ‘I like this event and that’s why I’ve come here.’ Calzaghe’s father and trainer Enzo, a diminutive man who never suppresses the opportunity to spill out a thousand words or so when assessing his son’s chances, says he spotted a chink in Lacy’s psychological armour when the two fighters finally stood head-to-head for publicity pictures. ‘Joe got right in his face and stared into his eyes and Lacy didn’t want to know,’ he said. ‘He looked away and I think it was the moment he realised exactly what he is up against.’

On the evening before the fight I was sitting in the restaurant of the Lowry Hotel, eating some pasta, when I got a call on my mobile from some guy with a Manchester accent. ‘Lacy’s gonna get you, Lacy’s gonna get you,’ he started chanting. ‘In round seven he will fuck you up.’ Charming. I don’t know how he managed to get my number because I never give it out to anybody but I laughed at him before he hung up. My mind was in the perfect place and some idiot making a crank call wasn’t going to knock me at this stage. I just felt so at peace. All these years this is what I’d trained for and I’ll always respect Lacy for coming to Britain to finally make my big fight happen. He could easily have priced himself out, like a lot of fighters do, then they pretend that they were willing to fight. I didn’t price myself out of the fight, that’s for sure, but to me it wasn’t about money. This was about legacy, I needed a big fight to establish my proper place in history and, finally, everything was slotting into place.

Even the Ashira fight I was able to turn into a positive in my mind. I had no regrets at all that I fought him because my destiny all along, I told myself, was to fight Lacy on 4 March. Because I broke my hand in the fight, I was able to get my right hand working, my jab, and the same thing when my left hand went in training mid-February. When I got back in sparring I used my right and worked on speed and the jab became lightning quick, the perfect weapon for a pressure fighter like Lacy. Being a fast-punching southpaw, I can win a fight by simply keeping my right foot on the outside of my opponent’s left and jabbing his head off. He can’t punch me, he can’t do anything and that’s the way it would turn out against Lacy. His stock had risen because of the way he destroyed Scott Pemberton on our cancelled date in November. I may have still been the favourite after his stoppage of Reid but the way he ripped through Pemberton made me an 11–10 underdog in the betting, which spurred me on. After all those fights where I was expected to win and had nothing to gain, suddenly I was in a great position. The pressure was off and the psychology was completely different. I just knew what Lacy would be thinking: I punch harder than that guy, I’m going to knock him out, he’s shot. He got put on his ass by a journeyman two fights ago, then he couldn’t even beat up a middleweight. Reid I knocked down four times and this guy only beat him on a split decision. Calzaghe’s mine. The fights with Salem and Ashira were blessings in disguise all along.

The morning of a fight I usually eat a large bowl of porridge or seven or eight Weetabix because they’re full of slow-releasing carbs, not the fast-releasing carbs in sugar for instance. But I made a mistake the night before the Lacy fight, I ate too much steak and pudding and couldn’t sleep when I went to bed because I felt bloated. When you haven’t eaten big meals for a long period and you’ve trained every day your stomach shrinks. But the next day I was fine, just knackered from the lack of sleep, though I never sleep well before I fight and I can’t have an afternoon nap either. I watched a comedy film called The 40 Year Old Virgin in my hotel room, which chilled me out and relaxed me, then I went for a walk. One of the Showtime TV guys couldn’t believe it when he saw me walking around the hotel alone. In all his years in boxing he had never seen a fighter on his own so close to a fight.

Those few hours by myself are when I get my mindset just right. I’ve already watched my opponent on tape, though not a complete fight. I might pick two or three rounds from one bout and that’s it, I know the guy and he’s in my mind. I don’t sit down and study with my dad because Dad scrutinises the guy’s style and his opinion means more to me than anybody’s when it comes to boxing. He knows what’s good for me and what’s bad, what kind of fighters will inspire a good performance, the kind of fighter that will give me a nightmare. Dad’s watched practically all of my fights, amateur and pro, and he knew that Lacy had a perfect style for me. Sometimes he’ll say to Frank, ‘No, we don’t want to fight so-and-so,’ and I’ll trust his judgement, but I go away on my own to think about the fight ahead of going to the arena. I think about walking into the ring and about what I’m going to do to counteract my opponent’s style. I picture what I’m going to do and it’s very vivid. I don’t think about the punches I’m going to throw, that’s all natural. I just think about what the other guy is going to do – maybe he’s going to run or come looking for where to land a big right hand? – and I think about what I’m going to do in terms of my movement. The main thing for me, as a southpaw, is to determine in which direction I’m going to move, whether it will be mostly to my left or to my right. A southpaw should move to his right most of the time, but not always because you can’t be predictable. Normally, I move to the left, which leaves me open to the right hand but Lacy was renowned for his left hook. I couldn’t think why because he didn’t knock people out with the left hook, from what I was able to see, so I figured that if I circled to his left that he wouldn’t be able to handle it. He would be off balance constantly and I saw that clearly in my mind.

I arrived at the MEN Arena and you wouldn’t have believed it was me who was fighting. I smiled and talked to people and did an interview for Showtime TV. Frank Warren looked at my dad and said quietly, ‘Is Joe all right?’ He was worried because I was so relaxed. I got to my dressing room, put on my music and danced around, then chilled out while my hands were taped up. It’s the same ritual every time but you don’t always feel the same. I didn’t feel like this when I fought Salem or Thornberry or Starie, and I knew on those nights that I wasn’t going to perform the way I know I can. You can’t make yourself become worried, the opponent has to do that for you. I’ve been boxing for twenty-five years and it takes a lot for me to become aroused. When I saw Lacy smashing up Reid, that got me excited and made me nervous. ‘I wouldn’t like to feel those right uppercuts,’ I thought to myself. ‘They lifted him clean off the floor.’ Lacy could hit and he had a body on him that made me train and made me get up in the morning. I trained so hard that as it got closer to the battle I couldn’t sleep. I was nervous, yet at 2 a.m., as I was about to leave my dressing room after stepping out of a cold shower, I just felt invincible and it’s the only time I’ve ever felt this way.

Lacy was already in the ring, prowling around, when I got in but there was nothing he could have said or done at that moment to make me fear him. Prodigy were belting out in the arena and the crowd were electric. Psychologically, I was so strong and so ready physically and mentally that it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d brought a gun into the ring. He started flexing his neck muscles and tried to look mean, just like Tyson used to do, but to me he looked more like Huggy Bear out of Starsky and Hutch. I was quite amused by his jacket and by his big pimp daddy friend in the corner, who was wearing a fur coat and kept shouting, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ When Lacy took off his jacket his body looked like it was chiselled out of marble, whereas I’m lean and I don’t have a big chest. If you had asked a hundred people who knew nothing about boxing which guy they’d rather have on their side, no one would have picked me. I was being told a different story though. I didn’t take my eyes off him but he couldn’t bring himself to look at me. He kept glancing away, looking down and looking out into the crowd. The build-up and the whole incredible atmosphere had started to get to him because he’d never been here before. He looked wary, almost like he was caught in headlights. I’m not saying he bottled it and that’s why he lost – I would have won the fight whatever his frame of mind – but the way he felt and the way I jumped on him were a perfect combination.

I knew what Lacy had expected to do when the bell rang, he thought he was going to roll over me. In the opening round he hit me with what turned out to be his best punch, a wicked right hand to the chin, but it did nothing. My head snapped back but I just stood there and he knew he had no more for me. When you’re as psyched up as I was you can take a heck of a punch and I expected him to hit me hard. I anticipated a war, so I was ready to march through a wall. When he hit me with one good punch I didn’t get too excited about it. I outworked him from the first bell, bombarded him with punches and his game plan was gone. As soon as he got outworked on the inside he had nothing left. His strategy, his only hope, was to beat me on the inside. I did him in on the inside so what was he going to do?

Barry McGuigan had warned me, ‘You don’t want to get inside with this guy.’ Barry was right but I was just so pumped up that it didn’t matter. I ripped him up on the inside too. My ability to fight inside is underestimated. I’m not the biggest puncher but I have fast hands and my movement makes me awkward inside. I knew he wasn’t going to catch me clean because my reflexes were quicker and I was able to smother him. I always try to get a sense of the ring because even though I’m an offensive fighter I’m naturally cautious. So my hands were high and I wasn’t looking for big left hands, I just picked him off with my jab and on the inside I made sure he wasn’t getting any free shots. But I fight when I want to fight and he realised this very quickly.

At the end of the round I put my hands in the air. I wasn’t being cocky but I could tell by looking at his face that he had no confidence at all now and knew exactly what he was up against. He got caught with as many punches in the first round as he’d taken probably in his entire career before then. Although my hands were low, the speed and volume of my punches just overwhelmed him. He tried to load up with his punches but I just stepped to the right and threw my jab, so that he could never get set. When my right hand was on the outside of his I was in charge of the fight. I was also quicker than him on the inside and landed my left uppercut at will and this became tremendously demoralising for him. He thought he was going to come in behind that right and start to dictate the terms of the fight, he thought it was going to be a quick night. Everybody had been falling at his feet but he was in a different league now and all he got from me was a smile and half a dozen hard punches in his face.

Lacy had come into the fight with a false sense of security because people told him that I was old and washed up, but there was just no way that he was going to come over here to do a number on me. I turned him constantly, which is what I worked on in the gym, lateral movement. In sparring I was jabbing and moving to my right and making my sparring partner look like an idiot, so I knew I could do the same against a guy who was confused by my movement and low on confidence because I was hitting him hard and often. He made it easy for me because he didn’t throw combinations and I was first to the punch all the time.

The adrenalin was pumping and I felt like Superman. My conditioning meant that I was able to box for all twelve rounds up on my toes, I just felt so good physically. Lacy was bleeding around both eyes from all the punches he had taken and his face was turning into a mess. I began to smile at him because I was having fun. It was like an exhibition for me, with me showing what I could do, but I was doing it against a world-class fighter. The only danger was that I could maybe go through a lull, which normally happens for me around about the seventh round. But I was aware before the fight that Lacy gets better the further it goes, so I never let up.

I had prepared myself to face something more than Lacy, I was prepared to take the hardest punches I’ve ever been hit with in my life. My brain sent me messages all night, reminding me that I was going to get hit, so be ready. I was prepared and Lacy wasn’t. He only prepared himself to come over to Manchester and take apart some old man who he thought couldn’t do it any more. He didn’t prepare himself and, suddenly, in that ring he knew he was in a real battle. But you have to prepare yourself. It’s too late when the cannons start. Within the first couple of minutes he was suffering from shell shock and by the seventh round, psychologically and physically, he was smashed, for he’d been hit by clusters of shots. Lacy was in great shape, he trained for three months and you could tell that by looking at him. But he didn’t fear me until he arrived and saw exactly the kind of man I am. Then it was too late because he didn’t have enough time to overcome his fear and channel it positively into his performance.

After eight or nine rounds Lacy had taken such a one-sided beating that many people said the fight should have been stopped. All I can say is that I’m a fighter and I don’t just mean by profession. A top fighter has to be a fighter inside as well because in the end that’s what it will come down to. There are many qualities that a fighter needs: ability, a natural ability to perform, dedication, conditioning. I’ve seen a lot of fighters with all the talent but they’re not dedicated, and I see boys with all the dedication but they’ll still never make it. When I watch a fighter go down and stay down, even though he could have got back up, I can never understand it because that’s just not in me. That’s what makes a great fighter, I believe, his heart and desire and willingness to go to the bottom of the well. I hope to God that it never comes down to this but I would never, ever think about quitting in the middle of a fight. People still ask me about the Lacy fight, if I think it should have been stopped. I’d be happy, if I was Lacy, that it wasn’t because I would want to go the twelve rounds and at least go out on my shield. So I don’t think that the fight should have been stopped and Lacy showed that it didn’t need to be. He lasted the course.

Rawling: ‘Last few seconds of a superb, wonderful boxing display. He has silenced the doubters and is boxing his way to a magnificent points victory, quite outstanding. Oh! How is Lacy staying up there? How is he staying up? A peach of a right uppercut from Calzaghe, the bell is about to sound, Calzaghe’s still picking his man off and Gary Shaw is shouting across at the Lacy corner to pull him out but it’s all over. Lacy comes forward and embraces Calzaghe. Let the doubters be silenced, Joe Calzaghe is absolutely, utterly top-notch and is now getting a rightful embrace from his father and trainer, Enzo Calzaghe, because I don’t really think that it gets very much better. That was quite outstanding.’

When the bell rang to end the fight I collapsed back onto the floor, not out of exhaustion but relief. I could have boxed for fifteen rounds easily but I could also have gone my entire career and never experienced pure elation, as I did at that moment. It wasn’t just that I won the biggest fight of my life, it was the way I won it. That’s what had clicked in my mind when my dad was saying in the weeks beforehand that I had to fight this fight, regardless of the injury to my left hand. ‘It’s not the winning or losing,’ he said. ‘It’s how you fight and it’s the fact that you fought.’ I had been pulling my hair out only two weeks earlier, thinking, ‘I can’t fight, I can’t fight.’ Even if I’d lost, I’d have got more respect than if I hadn’t gone through with the fight. If I had walked away with an injury, I would never have forgiven myself, it would have been torture. I would probably have disappeared off the radar and people would have called me every name under the sun. Then if I’d retired undefeated, people would have said, ‘So what? Big deal.’ But just one fight changed everything because of the way I fought. I couldn’t have written a better script.

What a fight. What a fighter. Joe Calzaghe’s brutal dismantling of Jeff Lacy is right up there with Randolph Turpin’s victory over Sugar Ray Robinson. It ranks alongside John Stracey’s win over Jose Napoles in Mexico and Lloyd Honeyghan’s beating of Donald Curry in Atlantic City. I raised eyebrows in Saturday’s column claiming Calzaghe was arguably Britain’s greatest champion. There won’t be many who disagree now. Lacy arrived in Manchester with the highest reputation and in possession of the IBF world supermiddleweight title. He started favourite with the bookies and most experts. Yet Joe made him look like a cab rank fighter. I had forgotten that Calzaghe could box like that. Memories had been dulled by the Kabary Salem bout and the fight against Evans Ashira, where he was utterly demotivated and dealing with the break-up of his marriage. This was the old Calzaghe, the fighter who had Chris Eubank on the seat of his pants when winning the WBO world title eight and a half years ago. The footwork, hand speed and combinations all returned. And with them the confidence. There will be the inevitable temptation to re-evaluate Lacy’s credentials after this. That would be an insult to Joe.

So many reports prior to the Lacy fight suggested all sorts of sorry ends for me. He was going to pulverise me and beat me to a pulp, then after the fight he was suddenly overrated. Who overrated him? The people who said he was going to beat me up? The truth is that I made Jeff Lacy look like an ordinary fighter by boxing as well as I could possibly box. Ultimately, it’s not about how good Lacy was anyway. For several years Floyd Mayweather has been regarded as the best pound-for-pound boxer in the world and he’s one of the few I believe to be genuinely superb. Technically, he’s tremendous, but I could find ways to slag him off and say negative things about his record. If people think Lacy was overrated, what about Carlos Baldomir? He had lost nine times before he ever fought Mayweather and Mayweather became the tenth, big deal. It doesn’t take a bright man to think up a negative line but it takes a special man to go out and accomplish something that not many other people think he can. There are still people who say that Lacy was overrated, Lacy was nothing, but they didn’t say too much before I fought him.

It meant a great deal to me to be presented with The Ring championship belt, which was on the line as well as my WBO title and Lacy’s IBF belt. There’s a lot of confusion in boxing today about who the proper champion is in each weight division because there are so many titles and so many title-holders, but very few fighters have worn this belt. It’s the toughest to win because you have to be the bona fide champion of your division and I’m proud to be the first super middleweight in history to win The Ring belt. No one can take it away from me. Someone else will be the champion one day but I have that belt now, just like Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey, Sugar Ray Robinson and Muhammad Ali. This was the icing on the cake to finally be acknowledged as the proper champion and have that recognition from an influential voice in American boxing. There will always be doubters when there are rival champions. An undefeated record means nothing if there aren’t good names on the record. Without Lacy on mine, people would have put me down as another Sven Ottke, an undefeated world champion nobody really gave two hoots about.

Calzaghe finally established himself as, arguably, the best boxer of his generation and one of the very best in British boxing history when he produced a flawless display to win every second of every round against the previously unbeaten American Jeff Lacy. ‘If Joe had beat somebody like that on the street, he would have been charged with GBH,’ his father and trainer Enzo said, while Frank Warren, Calzaghe’s promoter, added: ‘That was the best performance I’ve seen from any fighter in all my years in the sport.’ Dan Birmingham, Lacy’s trainer, agreed. ‘I’ve never ever seen a better performance anywhere in the world,’ he said. Even Calzaghe’s most biased fans failed to predict such an astonishingly easy victory . . . To say that Lacy was simply overwhelmed is to suggest that Calzaghe arrived in the ring better prepared. That only tells half the story because on Saturday night Calzaghe’s plan was quite brilliant. Lacy, his cornermen and his large entourage did not know how to respond.

Finally, people are giving me my dues, almost as if I’ve just arrived on the scene when, in fact, I’m now a thirty-five-year-old veteran and a world champion for ten years. My record speaks for itself, that’s why I beat Lacy the way I did and now I don’t feel like I need to prove much more. If I have a bad fight, it’s because I’m only human and sometimes I just won’t be able to get up for the guy, but that night against Lacy I showed balls. They brought over this knockout merchant from America, who’d been smashing the shit out of everybody, and they reckoned he was going to do the same to me. He was the younger, stronger and more fancied fighter but I was invincible that night. It took courage to do what I did and my speed was my power. I love to hear people say to me, ‘That was a great fight.’ 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 realise how good my performance was until I overheard some people talking as I walked out of the ring.