Calzaghe and Kessler: Embrace the unknown

By Bart Barry

Is there a single American fight fan who doesn’t remember the night Mikkel Kessler blew out Julio Cesar Green in Copenhagen? Or that unforgettable evening in Wales’ National Ice Rink when Joe Calzaghe pounded his way through Mger “Matador” Mkrtchian?

All right. You get the point: Most American fight fans have never seen Kessler or Calzaghe more than twice. Some Americans have never seen them once. No problem. You are all in for a treat.

This Saturday night in Cardiff, Wales’ Millennium Stadium, Calzaghe and Kessler will make a super middleweight match for the WBA, WBC, WBO, and Ring belts – on regular HBO. It will feature the two men rated the two best super middleweights by every credible source. No outcome, frankly, will be an upset because no one knows who’s going to win.

Nobody at all. Sure, there are European pundits who’ve seen plenty of both men and think they’ve got a firm idea whose hand will be raised. But they don’t know this result the way we knew Manny Pacquiao would beat Marco Antonio Barrera or the way we know Floyd Mayweather will beat Ricky Hatton.

Much of this uncertainty returns to the fact that neither “Pride of Wales” Calzaghe nor Kessler the Dane has spent more than an hour boxing outside his homeland. How important that makes Calzaghe’s upcoming home-ring advantage is worth pondering. And ponder it we will. But first let’s treat the fights Americans have seen.

Twenty months ago, Calzaghe fought Jeff Lacy in a WBO super middleweight title fight. Lacy, a muscular and hard-punching American, was expected to walk directly through Calzaghe. Instead, Calzaghe beat Lacy in a way that prompted commentator Larry Merchant to say, “He took him to school, flunked him and expelled him.” Scores were 119-105, 119-107 and 119-107 – and it wasn’t that close.

Some of “The Contender’s” fans may also have watched Calzaghe handle Peter Manfredo in April. That fight featured a premature third-round stoppage that was academic. Calzaghe was so much better than Manfredo that, before the fight, one journalist offered to write his next column without use of the letter ‘e’ if Manfredo somehow won.

Kessler’s exposure to American eyes has been even more limited. Those of us who didn’t catch Kessler on a Mandalay Bay undercard in 2000 had to wait seven years to see him in action again.

Then, last March in a WBA/WBC championship bout, Kessler treated us to a brutal 12-round decision over previously undefeated Librado Andrade. It was a fight that ringside judges all scored 120-108. It was also a power-punching clinic that made pundits look up “granitic” in their thesauri for new ways to describe Andrade’s chin after he survived it.

Both Calzaghe’s recent American-television fights happened in the United Kingdom. Kessler’s coming-out party against Andrade happened in his native country of Denmark. In fact, of the 82 fights Calzaghe and Kessler have collectively made, 78 have been on their native turfs. And that brings us back to the one obvious point of favor Calzaghe will enjoy this Saturday.

If a championship game were about to be decided by two teams with home records of 41-0 and 37-0, respectively, all bets would be on the home team. Boxing is not a team sport, of course, but it’s occasionally judged like one in Europe. A judge, however, needn’t always be crooked to favor the home fighter.

When the opening bell rings for Calzaghe-Kessler, as many as 60,000 Welshmen will begin cheering every hit of Calzaghe’s and every miss of Kessler’s. Such audience participation can affect even impartial judges. Advantage Calzaghe.

But who really thought an orthodox puncher like Kessler was going to decision a southpaw boxer like Calzaghe anyway?

Fighting in Calzaghe’s home stadium, Kessler is probably going to need a knockout to take Calzaghe’s WBO belt. But that would be almost as true if the fight were contested in the neutral ring of a Las Vegas casino.

Fortunately for Kessler, most credit him with being a harder puncher than Calzaghe. Where Calzaghe slaps with some punches, relying on quickness of delivery and volume, Kessler throws boxing’s simplest and most devastating combination: Left jab, right cross. Question is, will Kessler be able to land that combination on someone as quick as Calzaghe?

Even if Kessler is able to land that combination, will it be worth all the punches he’ll have to absorb to do it? Despite conventional wisdom about Kessler’s power and Calzaghe’s rat-a-tat punching style, Kessler and Calzaghe have almost identical career knockout ratios. Calzaghe may not have one-punch stopping power, but he hit hard enough to get Lacy’s respect in about 90 seconds.

Kessler, meanwhile, has defense enough that his last opponent, Andrade – who had a higher knockout percentage than both Kessler and Calzaghe – never had him in trouble for a moment. Kessler may not have Calzaghe’s craft and Calzaghe may not have Kessler’s power, but Calzaghe’s got plenty of pop and Kessler is plenty crafty.

Where does that leave us? With a fight whose outcome is unknowable but whose action is guaranteed. It also leaves us with the most-anticipated prizefight in some time. Pressed for a prediction, I’d take Calzaghe: UD 12.

Kessler: KO 10, though, makes as much sense.

But, again, no one knows who’s going to win. In conversations with fighters, trainers, matchmakers and promoters, since Calzaghe-Kessler was announced, I’ve collected more shrugs and shakes of the head than I’ve ever seen before. By next Monday, of course, none of them will have been surprised by the result. But right now no one has a reliable bead on the fight.

Finally, there’s this. Regardless of what Europeans opine of Americans, we’re a worldlier group than we get credit for being. We’re generous with our support and we appreciate novelty. Calzaghe-Kessler has novelty and class, and it deserves to be watched. And as a title-unification bout, it’s also the most practical idea to come out of Europe this year.