If the masterclass against Jeff Lacy is widely regarded as Joe Calzaghe’s finest performance, the victory over Bernard Hopkins might just be his greatest victory of all.
The Welshman had just impressively outpointed the previously undefeated Mikkel Kessler in his final fight at super middleweight, proving he remained the world’s leading fighter at 168lbs, when negotiations for a fight with the world’s leading light heavyweight, Bernard Hopkins, on April 19, 2008 began.
Calzaghe, then 36, travelled to Las Vegas, where Ricky Hatton was preparing to challenge Floyd Mayweather, and where a fight-week confrontation with Hopkins unfolded in front of the media present in Sin City for Mayweather Hatton that concluded with the antagonistic Hopkins declaring: “I’ll never lose to a white boy.”
“I wasn’t offended by it,” Calzaghe later said. “Bernard can be controversial. We saw what happened with him and Felix Trinidad when he stepped on the Puerto Rican flag.
“Nothing would surprise me with Bernard. As soon as he said it, I knew the fight was done.”
“That was my mindset at that time,” Hopkins reflected. “I had to be that villain. I had to be that guy that had a chip on his shoulder. I had to represent how I felt I had to represent.
“It wasn’t planned. With me things happen based on how things are going. I’m 90 per cent calculated but I had to take the bull by the horns.”
A rib injury suffered during the entertaining victory over Kessler contributed to Calzaghe’s reduced sparring for the occasion of his US debut, which was scheduled for the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas. Hopkins, typically masterful at unnerving his opponents, told Calzaghe of his desire to target those same ribs but found his psyche significantly more difficult to penetrate, owing not only to Calzaghe’s maturity and experience, but the confidence that came with his career-defining victory over Lacy in 2006.
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It is regardless also likely he was attempting to promote their fight when he returned to the sensitive subject of race through the Philadelphian, then 43, saying in the days before: “It’s always a race issue when it’s black versus white, whether it’s boxing, tennis or basketball.
“We dominate the sport. Africans. Hispanics; people of colour. We dominate this sport. That’s why it’s so important that when a white guy like [Wladimir] Klitschko comes along they call him the ‘Great White Hope’.
“If colour is not important for white people, then why is it so important for them to have a Great White Hope?
“I don’t take that as racist. I take that as white people wanting to represent themselves as a culture in the struggle of who’s better than who. I welcome that challenge and I welcome the challenge of Joe Calzaghe.”
The challenge of Calzaghe also, according to Hopkins, was the challenge of a 'con man', which he labelled him off the back of the perception that he had long been protected by his father and trainer Enzo and his promoter Frank Warren. The Welshman was also fighting little over a month after seeing his friend and stablemate Enzo Maccarinelli stopped by David Haye, and weeks after watching Andrey Kotelnik beat another in Gavin Rees.
“I always had left hand trouble,” the Welshman said. “That was on my mind but I was 100 per cent confident I could win. That’s what champions do. Go into the other guy’s backyard.”
It was perhaps even over-confidence that led to the first-round knockdown he suffered at the hands of not only one of the finest fighters of his era, but of all time.
If he was going to win, Calzaghe, fighting at 175lbs for the first time, was going to have to do so from a round and a knockdown down. His son Conor, distressed at watching his father hurt from as close as ringside, felt a hand land on his shoulder to console him, and turned to see that it belonged to none other than Whitney Houston.
That Calzaghe proved capable of making the necessary adjustments against so defensively a sound fighter – one who had previously only lost clearly to Roy Jones Jnr when the American was at his near unrivalled peak – is perhaps what defines him as Britain’s finest of all time.
“Bernard was so wily,” said Calzaghe, whose post-fight celebrations were attended by compatriots Tom Jones and Catherine Zeta Jones. “Old-school fighter; all the tricks of the trade. He went defensive knowing I like people to come to me, so he fought a good game plan and good fight.
“The rounds could be close. I lost the first obviously. The second, third and fourth were close. I knew I was chasing the fight, after six, seven rounds. Ten was close but I won most of the rounds other than that. I outworked him the second half of the fight.
“It wasn’t a great fight to watch but it was in my top couple of best wins because of the nature of the fight, coming from behind and fighting in Las Vegas against a future hall of famer, one of the best middleweights of all time, and he turned out to be a great light heavyweight too. Winning that fight was one of the best things of my career.”
Calzaghe fought only once more, when that November he recovered from another first-round knockdown to convincingly outbox the once-great Jones Jnr with a significantly more fluid performance before retiring undefeated.
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A month earlier Hopkins produced his most destructive performance of all to beat the dangerous Kelly Pavlik even more convincingly, and he remained an elite-level fighter until November 2014, therefore repeatedly enhancing not only his legacy, but Calzaghe’s, too.
“To me [Calzaghe’s] one of the greatest of all time,” he said long after their fight. “He can break bread with anyone in any weight division.”
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