Round by Round: Weekly Boxing Notes

Haye Dude, WTF?↵Leaving aside for the moment the aftermath of Alfredo Angulo’s untimely loss to Kermit Cintron last Saturday night (you can check out my thoughts on that over at No Mas), by far the biggest news of this week in boxing was that David Haye pulled out of his heavyweight title fight with Wladimir Kiltschko, scheduled for June 20th, due to a back injury suffered in training.↵
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↵One is always inclined to be doubtful about these “injuries suffered in training” – I immediately think of Zab Judah’s infamous forearm gash reportedly incurred in a “shower accident” that forced the cancellation of his bout with Shane Mosley. That Zab’s arm was badly cut was not subject to debate (it needed 50 stitches to close). It was the whole “shower accident” business that did not ring true. I guess a guy like Zab works hard, plays hard, and showers really fricking hard.↵
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↵That David Haye is actually having back problems does not seem out of the realm of possibility, I grant you.

And having quite a bad back myself, I know how it can put a crimp in your fight game (I’ve been on the schneid for about two years now due to a bad back, and I’m not sure I’ll ever make it back to the ring… another great amateur boxing career tragically cut short). If your back is tweaked in just the right way, it’s difficult to walk, let alone fight a monster with the size and skills of Wlad the Impaler.↵
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↵So, you know, I’m aware of all that. But let us just understate the case considerably and say that the timing is terrible. All of Haye’s wailing and gnashing of teeth to get this fight, the t-shirts garnished with gruesome Klitschko beheadings, the endless blather about burning and looting and restoring dignity to the heavyweight division… it was all so over the top, so gloriously preposterous, and I’ll be the first to admit that I loved every bit of it. Like every true boxing fan worth his salt, I hunger for a heavyweight to come along who gives me a chubby, and to my mind, this dread-locked British clown seemed about as good a pony as any to lay my money on in a race that’s been devoid of interest for going on a decade now. He’s handsome, articulate, and he knocks muh-fuhs out for real. Plus, in the grand tradition of Mike Tyson and Larry Holmes, for such a big bad man, he has a bizarrely feminine voice. All the elements seemed in place.↵
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↵Even given my unconditional support, I was fully prepared for Haye to get violently decapitated by Klitschko when they finally got in the ring together. I was not, however, prepared for him to pull out of the fight three weeks beforehand claiming a sore back. A broken back? You give him that. But the dude is saying that he’ll be ready to fight after only three weeks postponement. He expects Klitschko to believe this and hang around to reschedule for July 11th.↵
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↵In other words, this doesn’t exactly sound like a fifty-stitches kind of situation, and it makes me wonder if the Hayemaker isn’t just taking the easy way out on this one. Because I seriously doubt the fight will ever happen now. Why would Wlad Klitschko agree to wait three weeks to fight Haye with no guarantee that the injury won’t just crop up again and force another postponement, or, if it doesn’t, with the fact staring him in the face that if he does destroy Haye, the first thing Haye will say in the post-fight presser is, “well, you know, I’ve got this bad back, innit?”
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↵No way, not guh duh, as Dana Carvey would say in the voice of George Bush the Elder. This little summer heavyweight fantasy of ours is over (“out on the road today, I saw a David Haye sticker on a Cadillac…”), and I can’t help but think that it’s because the big-talking Hayemaker got cold feet in the end, that like so many self-anointed heavyweight saviors of the past, he turned out to be only an illusion made of angry words and bombastic visions, or as one of Haye’s ancestral countrymen put it so much more poetically, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”↵