Sumbu Kalambay’s excellent boxing performance against Mike McCallum (first fight)

Kalambay beat a guy who beat Hearns twice. How is McCallum losing to him relevant vis a vis fabulous four?

 

You know you're a special talent when you can outclass Mike McCallum.

 

Nothing wrong with the decision in the Kalule fight. Graham clearly beat him in the rematch too.

Southpaws. And damn good boxers too, mind you.

 

It’s been a while but I thought Kalumbay deserved the nod — but not a complete robbery. Kalule gave him some trouble and is an underrated guy anyway.

 

This fight, and Leonard vs Benitez showcased the
beauty of two supremely skilled fighters at
there best matching wits, and physicality.
This fight also is a great indication of though
Mccallum no doubt was an excellent fighter,
he was a half step behind the fab 5, (I always
include Benitez whom for some reason doesn't get
the recognition he rightfully deserve.)
Not quite on the level as those 5 fighter as
he likes to claim he was.

 

Love Toney to death, but I think Kalambay would have been a rotten matchup for him, prime for prime. Cagey guys with good foot speed were sometimes a struggle for Toney.

Obviously if the fight had happened it wouldn't have done so until around 1991 / 1992, by which time Toney would have been getting a slightly faded version of Kalambay….But still stylistically a horrible fight for him even then. Toney at Middleweight, though he wasn't always that active throughout the fight, usually had something big in reserve for the championship rounds which got him out of jail against Nunn and Johnson, had McCallum badly hurt and in trouble in the twelfth of their first fight etc. - that absolutely horrendous performance where he was running on fumes at the end against Tiberi is the exception. Toney could really punch at 160, too, and by the early nineties Kalambay was getting hit a bit more and prone to taking the odd knockdown, which might make the difference in a close fight here.

At the time, Toney as the younger, fresher man would probably have just about got the job done, in a fight where he didn't look too impressive and where the decision could possibly have been a shade controversial. But prime for prime? I wouldn't put it past Kalambay to hand Toney a loss.

 

I thought Kalambay earned the decision against Kalule, but he was clearly bothered by southpaws. Kalule, Graham and Nunn all put him down, despite not being great punchers.

 

One the most underrated fighters in history .A forgotten master.

 

Duran lost to Kirkland Laing, was humiiatied by Hearns and Hearns lost twice to Barkley, does that nullify all their other achievements and great wins ?? Of course not, what nonsense. One loss or more than loss doesn't negate numerous good wins and performances that a fighter also produced.
McCallum has on his CV wins and performances that for me prove he would have been more than a legitimate opponent for any of the fab 4, would he have beaten all of them ?? No, styles make fights, but one loss to an arguably ATG talent in Kalambay (later avenged BTW as great fighters often do) proves little.

 

I think it's a tricky one with McCallum in terms of whether or not he was avoided. The term 'avoided' or 'ducked' can have so many different definitions or applications depending on who is using it.

Straight off the bat, there's not much evidence (to me at least, maybe others know better) to suggest that McCallum was ever avoided by Hagler or Leonard. This looks to me like those cases where people look back at an era, see there were some guys who were fighting roughly around the same weights during roughly the same years, and from that deduce that the fight not happening = a duck. The same way people now occasionally claim, with the memory of those times fading, that De la Hoya ducked Winky, or that Mayweather ducked Margarito or Williams. McCallum didn't go up to Middleweight until after Hagler had been dethroned and was talking about retirement. I've never really seen much to suggest that McCallum was actively calling out Hagler before this point, or considering moving up to 160. When he did move up post-Hagler, he lost his first title fight there against Kalambay.

The Leonard one is even more ridiculous. Leonard first quit in '82 when McCallum was just another contender on his way up, and made a brief return in '84, still a few months before McCallum had become a champion. Yeah, he could have picked McCallum for his return in 1984, but if he had we'd be sat here know saying he could have just as easily picked Howard, Mannion, Drayton etc. Even though people likely rated him as a better talent than those guys, McCallum was ultimately just one of a series of contenders who still had it all to prove in early 1984. When Leonard came back again three years later, the whole world wanted to see him against Hagler.

In the cases of Duran and Hearns, though, I think the water is a little more muddied and McCallum maybe has some grounds for grievance. He was Duran's mandatory for the WBA Light-Middleweight title, after all, which Duran vacated for the Hearns fight. Now of course, Hearns was bigger money and an even harder fight in all likelihood, as we saw. You might say that jumping out of the way of McCallum and into the path of Hearns is like jumping out of the way of a car and into the path of a freight train, so the idea of it being a duck must be fanciful.

But I tend to evaluate claims of ducking on the risk:reward ratio. Duran didn't really have much to lose against Hearns, in my opinion, and of course everything to gain. He was the underdog, getting a big purse and if he won, there's be no superlatives worthy of describing his victory. Against McCallum it was the opposite of all that. He'll have known that Hearns sparking him probably wouldn't be too harmful to him, but being outboxed and made to look toothless by McCallum, probably for a third of the money, would be a nightmare. Maybe not an outright duck, but I do believe that Duran was happy to turn his head and pretend that he didn't know McCallum existed during this period.

As for Hearns, that's probably the most likely avoidance of McCallum. Not so much because of Hearns himself, but because of Steward. It's also the fight, from what I've seen, which McCallum was most vocal about and that he genuinely did try and make happen at the time, as opposed to the Hagler and Leonard fights which only really seemed to gain any traction years down the line. We've all heard the reports that when they were Kronk gym mates, McCallum gave Hearns all he could handle in sparring and then some. McCallum (and later McClellan, oddly enough) stated that one of his reasons for having to leave Steward was Manny's obsession with Hearns above all else, and that he'd badgered Manny for the fight, which fell on deaf ears.

Steward, of course, was in Milton McCrory's corner when McCallum stopped him in 1987, and didn't take kindly to McCallum's goading of him after the fight. Apparently at that point Steward decided that, no matter what, he'd never let Hearns face McCallum, in large part to spite Mike. Steward claimed it was purely personal, but rumours abound that in the back of his mind, based on their sparring and how Hearns' particular frailties matched against McCallum's particular strengths, he'd always thought McCallum was wrong for Tommy, was mindful to keep his guy away from him, and that the goading after the McCrory fight was just a convenient pretext....But we'll never know for sure.

None of them, in isolation, can be called unequivocal ducks, but not getting any of the fights at all is, perhaps, not a coincidence. McCallum might like to blow his own trumpet a bit, and probably goes overboard in claiming just how avoided he was....But he does have a point, in my opinion.