Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 26 April 2008

Old Soldiers

issue 26 April 2008

Being a sports fan is, as Max Mosley knows too well, a painful and often expensive business. I knew my cavalier investment in Bernard Hopkins to beat Joe Calzaghe on Saturday night, despite Hopkins at 43 being almost as old as I am, was heading where the sun don’t shine as soon as Tom Jones popped up in the ring to sing the Welsh national anthem. Crikey, he’s good. It made my hairs, what’s left, stand on end so God knows what it did for Calzaghe let alone the flag-loads of Welsh fans ringside in Vegas.

In truth it was a nasty, tight, uninspiring fight. Now Calzaghe has said he’s going to fight Roy Jones, 39, and the official ‘Fighter of the Decade’ — though that decade was the 1990s. I don’t want to moan, but shouldn’t these guys be fighting each other when they are at their physical peak, not just their bankable peak?

I suppose Calzaghe is just putting off the point at which he becomes an ex-boxer.

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