Calzaghe got dropped by an almost 50 year old RJJ?

Thanks KO artist, I enjoy reading your posts too.

 

No, it's not a big stretch at all. Naturally YOU would say that seeing as you're one of the biggest Calzaghe haters on this site and have devoted such a freakish amount of your time on here to trying to discredit him. lol. In fact, I'd say he would've been a dead cert for a bronze at the very least. Personally I think he would've stood a very high chance of winning the silver. I even think he would've stood a pretty good chance of nabbing the gold (and before you ask, I'm a huge fan of amateur boxing and I'm familiar with the Cuban who won the gold). Calzaghe's style was very well suited to the amateur system: crazy high work rate, threw a ton of punches (and they weren't just slaps back then either, he threw plenty of power shots too mixed in with those lighter flurries, and the were concussive too). He also had a great chin and super powers of recovery so you can pretty much rule out him getting stopped.

Calzaghe victim Richie Woodhall won Olympic bronze in Seoul. I'm sure you're no doubt aware which fighter it was who stood in his way from him grabbing the silver.

Robin Reid also won a bronze in the Barcelona Olympics, that's the same Reid that one of the worst versions of Calzaghe to ever step foot in a ring beat. lol. Excuse the digression but a lot of people are either completely unaware or conveniently choose to ignore the following info when it comes to discussing Joe's poor showing in that fight:

Calzaghe was going through a terrible phase of injuries around that time in his career (they started whilst he was in training for his second defence against mandatory challenger Juan Carlos Gimenez and he didn't fully recover from them until he fought Omar Sheika), mainly to his elbow and his wrist, the later of which was a recurrence of an old injury that nearly put an end to his career as a teenager (he was told by a specialist he'd never box again). It was an injury that would plague him for his entire career by the way. He had to have surgery on it before the Reid fight, hence why the fight had to be postponed and he'd been out action for 10 months.

Then calamity stuck again when he suffered another injury in training (I think it was to his elbow this time) and he had to curtail his sparring sessions after only managing to squeeze in 14 rounds, hence why he was so flat and easy to hit. He also badly injured his left hand (his power hand) in the 4th or 5th round and it had a drastic effect on the amount of hard shots he was able to throw with it - he was winning handily (no pun intended) up until that point but after the hand went he had great problems keeping Reid off of him and Reid managed to get a foothold in the fight. Basically, everything that could of went wrong in that fight did go wrong but despite all the monumental bad luck Joe still managed to eke out the win. The commentary team even mention during the fight that there had been rumours leaked from Cardiff that his sparring had to be cut short because of injuries to his wrist and elbow and I remember reading about his injury woes in the boxing press around that time too.

Here's the medal winners from those Olympics, but it's a stretch to say Joe would've medaled, right? lol

Juan Carlos Lemus (Gold) CUB
Orhan Delibaş (Silver) NED
György Mizsei (Bronze) HUN
Robin Reid (Bronze) GBR

Here's a snippet from of his post-fight interview from the Juan Carlos Gimenez fight where he comments on not being able to spar due to his injury woes.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUnsFNByCjM[/ame]

And here's one where he talks about that wrist injury that almost ended his career as a teenager.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVtLka4KN-c[/ame]

And here's one where Barry McGuigan and Steve Bunce comment on the state of his hands. Check out the bit where McGuigan comments about Calzaghe having a second ridge of knuckles on the back of his hand due to breaking his metacarpals so many times.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCu90351MDo[/ame]

 

He didn't get sent to the box off, a guy named Matthew Turner did and he lost to Reid.

As I'm sure you're no doubt aware amateur fights are notoriously hard to track, and video footage even is even harder, but I definitely remember reading that somewhere. I don't make **** up by the way, I leave that to the haters. Klemetsen, like many bangers, didn't have the sturdiest of chins and like I said Joe used to hit much harder pre ****ed hands (which I'm sure hater you will probably try and dispute) so I have no reason to doubt it's true.

 

Yes I heard that was a bad one.

I'm a huge Eubank fan too by the way. :hey

 

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP79Owcp9hw[/ame]