BOXING LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE FIGHT Keith Dugganfinds the undefeated Welsh champion in confident mood as he prepares for his first high-profile fight in the United States
THE LATE blooming of Joe Calzaghe as a popular figure has been one of the strangest contradictions in modern sport. In an epoch when any half-wit can get hold of the limitless currency of celebrity, one of the most successful and marketable boxers of the last decade has had an obscure, vague sort of fame.
The Welshman's record of 44 fights unbeaten and the dead grip he has maintained on (the IBF variation) of the super middleweight title for over 10 years makes his low register with the sporting public seem all the more confounding, a fact made evident to excruciating effect when he polled behind the Royal showjumper Zara Phillips for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year two years ago.
Since then, there has been a belated and almost embarrassed rally to appreciate Calzaghe now that he has begun to speak openly of retirement.
In a peculiar way, his clash with Bernard Hopkins in Las Vegas late tonight will be akin to a debut. The glitz and fakery and arid heat of the desert is opposite to everything Calzaghe has championed as a fighter who in spirit has never really wanted to leave the inglorious kip of a boxing hall outside Newbridge where he hones his art.
Although he has often publicly mused about his status as the invisible champion, Calzaghe gives the impression of being secretly - and rightly - proud of never buying into the preposterous hype that governs big-time boxing. When he showed up in New York late last February for an orchestrated 'face-off' and pow-wow with Hopkins, he looked the part in a black suit and he is as accomplished as any of the great Welsh thespians when it comes to hamming it up for the cameras.
Later, when the two fighters retreated into far corners of the room, Hopkins kept his hood pulled over his head as he delivered one of the long, rhapsodic, stream-of-consciousness oratories that have become his trademark.
The Philadelphian is in fabulous athletic shape for a man of 43 years old and he is a crafty operator both inside and outside the ring. He rarely misses a chance to share his dark philosophy on a world shaped by a bleak childhood in the city of brotherly love, where he served five years for burglary and where his older brother was shot dead.
But as fascinating as Hopkins can be to listen to, there is a nagging feeling he can drift into autopilot as he delivers his state-of-the-soul addresses.
Calzaghe, though, spoke rapidly and earnestly and seemed torn between wanting to impress the largely American audience to whom he is a new entity and reinforcing his own sense of identity.
"I fight for me and my family. I don't care about the rest," he said at one point, his clear Valleys accent ringing around the empty Planet Hollywood restaurant where dead movie stars smiled down from the walls.
"I have been boxing for 26 years. I am just going to be back in Wales in grainy, cold, freezing Wales, the same way as I always prepare and that is going to be enough come April 19th. I want to make this year my last year. But when I was 27 I said I wanted to stop when I was 30 and I am still going. Not many fighters retire undefeated at the top of their game. And regardless of money and fame, that is hardly ever done. I could have tried for easier fights and go 50 and zero. But I want to go out looking for fights.
"That is why I have come all the way to America to fight a big- mouth who believes he is king of the castle. And if Bernard thinks he is tough, let him come to the Valleys where I am from. Go down to the local pub and you got to fight with women, with mates, you get all kind of fights."
He laughed after his last line and, finding a familiar face, he murmured self-consciously, "I don't think they got that last one. Don't think they understood that."
But Calzaghe's insistence of transforming the humble gym where he learned his trade from Enzo, his father, into the mythical place from where he draws all his emotional and physical power is the most appealing part of his story. He combines a fierce loyalty to Wales with an Italian sensibility and even now, in his mid-30s, he fluctuates from braggadocio and vulnerability about how he is regarded by the outside world. It is odd to hear an established - and immovable - world champion almost trying to persuade the public of his worth.
But he has been dogged by the fact that throughout his long career, he never met the two best exponents in his weight division, Roy Jones and, in his prime, Hopkins. Because he had never travelled to America, there was an assumption he was content to be prince of small-town south Wales, hand-picking his fights as he went. However, his form of the past two years, and in particular his destruction of Mikkel Kessler which gave him the WBO, WBC, WBA and Ring magazine titles, meant the world could ignore him no longer. And as Calzaghe at last prepares to face 'The Executioner', he argues it was the Americans who were keen to avoid him down the years.
"It would have been easy for me to stay at home and fight in Wales. We could get three of four more defences and finish 50 and 0. But before I met Kessler, I had to look at bigger names. We have been trying to make this fight happen for six of seven years. We tried to make a fight with Bernard before. And Roy Jones didn't want to know about it.
"I wouldn't be going to America unless I believed I could dominate this guy. I believe I am a better boxer - I have the speed, youth, strength, power and work- rate. You can see it.
"Hopkins is crafty and cagey and being at home, he is going to hope to bend the rules a bit. Styles make fights. Hopkins is a thinking fighter, he is defensive and tricky. He might run for a bit or he might come out and throw the big right early. Who knows? I have my own thing to do. Every fighter likes recognition from all over so of course it is important to me to be recognised here. I want to show people that the best fighter in the world is from Wales. Not England - Wales."
In 1997, Calzaghe met Chris Eubank, the self-styled gentil pugilist who was a ubiquitous presence on mainstream English television. It was as though the torch had been passed. Calzaghe floored Eubank with an impudent left hook thrown in the very first round and the shock registered on Eubank's face as he quickly picked himself up from the canvas, smiling menacingly at the younger man. It was a 12-round brawl and although the Welshman was the victor, Eubank, so infuriating in victory, found himself a national darling in defeat.
Shortly afterwards, boxing all but disappeared off terrestrial television and while Calzaghe drew big Welsh crowds to his fights, he made little impression on the wider public.
His father Enzo was a Sardinian who played in a band and met Calzaghe's mother Jackie in a Wimpy restaurant in Cardiff when she took his order. They wed four weeks later. Enzo nurtured his son's fascination with boxing, teaching him the basics at nine and then marrying established boxing styles with his own colourful instinct to provide his son with a repertoire that suited his speed and athleticism.
As a teenager, Calzaghe suffered from bullying at school and although he speaks reluctantly about the experience today, he has admitted that he endured miserable and friendless years in a school where he spoke to no one. The anxiety of that time was visible on Calzaghe's face when he was unexpectedly asked about it on a morning television interview late last year.
He was sitting on his couch in sweat gear surrounded by the decorative belts he owned after the Kessler fight when the question came down his earpiece and hit him like an unseen hook.
Calzaghe mumbled an evasive reply but he was agitated and awkward and in that moment he looked almost frightened. Perhaps because of that, all the posturing and boasting that comes with boxing has never come too easily to Calzaghe.
And perhaps it was as well that he was a hero only in his homeland.
For several years, his career seemed destined to glide along at the same low-level trajectory, beset by injuries and a painfully public divorce case.
But in 2006, he forced people to take notice with his withering defeat of Jeff Lacy, a 28-year-old undefeated American with a glowing reputation. That fight took place in Manchester but it was home that Calzaghe would refer to afterwards, recalling how a few days beforehand he had stood in his garden while the snow fell and that was overcome by an absolute and serene knowledge that he would win.
Still, he only managed runner-up in the BBC awards, an anomaly that was righted last Christmas with his successful defeat of Kessler. Around then, word of a show-business bout with Hopkins started and whether Calzaghe likes it or not, he found himself posing for photographs on Times Square and laughing at Hopkins's theatrical if inflammatory promise that he would "never lose to a white man".
In a phone conversation days before he left for Vegas, the Welshman insisted Hopkins's darker outbursts are of no consequence to him. And he became animated when told Hopkins had boasted of Calzaghe needing a face-lift after their fight.
Calzaghe shares with Gavin Henson an eccentric combination of Welsh working class values and an almost effete vanity. (And the photogenic Italian looks do beg the question as to why he hasn't been plastered on billboards and beaming at us from television screens, selling us stuff for the last 10 years. Again, more credit it to him that he has not).
"Well, that's a lie to start with," Calzaghe laughed. "He is the one who needs a face lift. He is the ugly one! I think he got that one backwards. I would really struggle to make him look any uglier than he is. It would be pretty difficult. It is the ones that look pretty that you worry about. The ones that look like that you don't because it means they are easy to hit.
"I mean, so much for a great defence! He must have walked into a lamp post to get a nose like that, that is all I can say.
"And I don't care about that other stuff. That was a stupid comment by Bernard. He was asked a question and he seemed quite embarrassed at the way he responded. If you are asking me if I was offended: no. I laughed. Because I won't lose to any guy, regardless of skin colour.
"I am undefeated. If he feels he has to make that comment, that is up to him. I am here to fight, Bernard can psyche himself up as he wants to.
"All I look at is a guy in the opposite corner who is 43. Okay, he beat Winkie Wright and [ Antonio] Tarver but he is up against a totally different animal in me and he is going to find out why I have been champion for 17 years."
His hope is that boxing fans in general will discover the same thing. The Calzaghe fight marks the second mass British exodus to Vegas, where the dancing Floyd Mayweather deftly outpunched and outclassed Ricky Hatton a few months ago.
A part of Calzaghe was seduced by the Hollywood aura surrounding that fight even though he has, for 10 years, stayed true to the principle that none of that stuff matters.
Its just that he wants - and needs - a taste of it before he leaves. And he enjoys the idea of half of Cardiff heading over to the jewel of Nevada for the weekend.
"I hear there are thousands coming," he said cheerfully down the phone line.
"People who don't even bother to see me fight in Cardiff are heading over. I think everyone wants to get away for a good old piss-up and a party. And that will bring pressure. But I love that."
It has been a long slow build-up but at last, the invisible champion will own the night in Fight Town.
