American heavyweights too lightweight for world champion David Haye -- The Guardian

By Kevin Mitchell, Guardian.co.uk

Bernard Hopkins, the 45-year-old Philadelphian who lost to Joe Calzaghe two years ago, did more than put an intolerable strain on the fight fraternity's ability to accommodate nonsense when he called out the WBA world heavyweight champion David Haye last week. He confirmed the widespread view that boxing in America is on life support.

Hopkins fights the 41-year-old shadow of Roy Jones Jr in Las Vegas next weekend in what is being sold (on pay-per-view, believe it or not) as the settling of a 17-year-old score for Hopkins and the extension of his damaged legend for Jones but what is, in reality, a pension bout for both of them.

It hardly matters who wins this terribly late rematch – Hopkins will knock out Jones and possibly do him serious damage. But it does matter when an old fighter thinks he can challenge a champion 16 years younger and four stones heavier than him, a scenario that would have been considered improbable as well as disrespectful in the sport's heyday.

Boxing has not been in such poor shape in the United States in living memory. And nowhere is the dearth more apparent than among the heavyweights.

Haye has business of his own against an at least credible opponent, the seasoned American John Ruiz, in Manchester on Saturday night. He was amused when informed of Hopkins's outlandish suggestion.

"He's just saying that for publicity for his own fight," he said. "I wouldn't take it too seriously."

But he is taking Ruiz seriously, even though the quiet man from Boston will not be remembered as among the best former champions of a poor era.

"You've got to respect what Ruiz has done. In the last 10 years of heavyweight boxing he's been in there and given a good account of himself. He knocked Evander Holyfield down. Mike Tyson couldn't do that. Even Lennox Lewis in 24 rounds couldn't do it. Ruiz doesn't get much respect but he's an effective heavyweight."

It is not exactly how they described Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali or Joe Frazier. It might be the sort of bad joke they would put on a lousy fighter's gravestone: Here lies Canvasback Casey, an effective heavyweight.

But that is how it is in what has been the lodestar of the fight game for at least 100 years. There is nobody in America working at or beyond 15 stones who would make more than adequate sparring partners for the fine champions they produced throughout the 20th century. It is not that ludicrous to suggest even Tyson could come back and not look out of place.

Haye, whose talent shines through in his power and electric movement, says the skill levels are not evident any more. "That's what's wrong with heavyweight boxing. You've got guys like Ruiz, just mauling, coming in with their head down and fighting ugly to get the win. I'm not going to let him do that. I'm going to make him fight my way, fight exciting."

That is to be seen. It is hard to imagine the one-dimensional Ruiz, at 38, changing habits he has accrued in 54 contests stretching back to 1992.

Haye's mission, he says, is to unify the title and that can be done only by fighting the Klitschko brothers, Wladimir and Vitali, who own the other bits of it. "One of them, both of them, whoever I can get my hands on," is how he put it. "I'd fight them on the same night if possible."

Wladimir ended the pathetic challenge of Eddie Chambers for his WBO and IBF belts in Düsseldorf last weekend with a left hook to the temple that left the overweight peacenik sprawled across the bottom rope. And "Fast" Eddie was reckoned to be the best of America's depleted heavyweight stock.

Klitschko rocked him in round two but did not finish him. He had him going in the seventh but had another attack of compassion. Haye was so uninterested he did not interrupt his training to watch it but he caught the last round on YouTube. As Haye put it: "He's afraid to engage. Chambers looked like a typical overweight American heavyweight who just turned up to collect his pay cheque."

He added: "People talk about my fight against [Nikolai] Valuev as being not the most entertaining of fights but look at the differences: he was a foot taller than me and seven stones heavier. What the hell is Wladimir's excuse, fighting the way he did against someone who is six foot, completely out of shape and has not got any punch power anyway?"

If Haye thinks little of the Americans, they do not exactly have him on a pedestal. "I tell people I'm fighting the champion," Ruiz said earlier in the week, "and people ask me, David Who?"

Haye is not bothered. "It would be nice to crack America," he says, "but I need the opponent to do that. If Eddie Chambers is the best American heavyweight they can dig up, it's a very sad state of affairs."

That it is. Of the top 10 contenders gunning for the titles held by Haye and the Klitschkos, three are Americans and two of those, Chambers and Tony Thompson, have both lost badly in world title challenges – to Wladimir Klitschko. There are three Russians on the list, a Nigerian, a Pole, a Ukrainian and a Cuban.

Those are tough numbers for American fight fans to swallow. For the time being Europe is once more the home of boxing.

Source: guardian.co.uk