Joe Calzaghe, PPV fights and ruminations

I'm reviewing the Ring top ten supermiddleweights and I should lead in by saying that Joe Calzaghe has proven himself to me. While I doubt very much Joe was staying up nights sweating my approval, I am in my own way representative of the American fight fan (the North American fight fan, anyway). Winning us over has long been one of Joe's aims, although he's certainly taken the long way round to do it: fighting practically only ever at home in Wales. Now, I can hardly blame him now that I see what a huge draw he is there. He's a rock star, but he was a big fish in a small pond for a very long time. I give him credit for believing in himself and his talent as compared the fighter pool in the world at large that he had such faith that the world would eventually have to come to him. We hardcore fans have. That said, he hasn't drawn the casual fight fan quite as easily. That his superfight against the aptly still highly ranked Mikkel Kessler showed on regular pay cable and not pay-per-view is a testament to that.

Joe's destruction of Jeff Lacy put us on notice and he's been similarly impressive since (he underperformed once, but every fighter is human and it's tough to get up for every fight, especially when the competition isn't uniformly top caliber...and he still won). The Manfredo fight was stopped a terrible stoppage, but noone who watched it thought Manfredo stood a chance after watching it for just a few minutes...so what's the point of complaining. The hometowning grates against my sense of justice, but it's not for Manfredo that I cringe but for fairness...because Manfredo acquitted himself so dismally that night as to fail to merit my championing his cause. Joe would've obviously just used his head for shoeshine practice all night long. Showing that next gear against Kessler was the final act to establish himself as worthy of his Ring championship belt, a belt he'd worn in my mind loosely even after exposing Lacy because well...maybe he just had the right style. No. He's the real deal. A pound-for-pound top ten fighter.

On a different topic, I'll admit that when I saw the second half of '07 included this and a couple of other dream fights (Taylor/Pavlik and Vasquez/Marquez II, for two) on premium, but not pay-per-view, I could hardly believe my good fortune. And while the kind of matchmaking that ended 'o7 seems to be continuing on into '08 (the aforementioned two fights going again, for starters), I wonder whether that bodes well for boxing that a bunch of truly great fights can't draw pay-per-view. I do note that one of those two rematches is indeed going PPV, but a laundry list of upcoming already-made fights are not: Klitschko/Ibragimov; Maskaev/Peter; Casamayor/Katsidis; Dawson/Johnson. Okay, so these aren't all great fights and I'm not saying I'd pay for them all, but put them together on a couple of reasonably priced PPVs and I'd buy them.

Which brings me to another beef: why didn't ESPNs fantastic idea of lesser priced PPV cards catch on? Why can't HBO or Showtime give us multiple "lesser" matches with good fighters for less than $49.95 or $54.95? Packed cards with three or four great fights for $24.95? It'd be easy to put three or four FNF main event caliber fights together in a row on a given night and while none of the names would draw alone, if they each drew significantly from their own geographic areas and drew in hardcore fight nuts like me, I'd think it would make money! In a way, I shouldn't complain because of course I have both channels and specifically for their boxing programming, but if better multiple match PPVs were put together, I can't be the only one who would buy them. Again, kudos to ESPN for being ahead of their time. Apparently so far ahead that it isn't coming around again...but that's just a shame.