Across his fine career, Joe Calzaghe fought a who’s who of boxing legends, including Roy Jones Jr, Chris Eubank and Bernard Hopkins.
And the Welshman beat them all, as well as all of the other men he faced before retiring unbeaten after 46 contests.
Although his long-time rival Carl Froch calls into question one of the results against Robin Reid, Calzaghe also holds the record for longest reigning world super-middleweight champion in history, having held his belt for over a decade and defending it 21 times.
Speaking to Boxing News, Calzaghe admitted that of all the men he faced, it was a Danish man, Mikkel Kessler in 2007, who gave him his toughest night.
“My hardest fight was Eubank, but Kessler was my toughest opponent. He was at his peak, was younger and undefeated. Not to mention, there was a lot of pressure for me to fight in my home stadium.
It was a hard fight and I was unnecessarily too aggressive in the first part of it. He caught me with a couple of uppercuts in the fourth and I thought, ‘Yeah. He hits hard.’ That’s when I changed tactics, because if I had continued to fight that way, I would have been in trouble. So, I started boxing, using my jab, using my feints and being calmer, which allowed me to outbox him for the second half of the fight. Those tactics got me the win.”
