Calzaghe v Magee OFF!!!

[barryboy]

WBO DEAL CALZAGHE NEW BODY BLOW

Thursday 17th March 2005

Joe Calzaghe's title showdown with Brian Magee has been cancelled.

The proposed WBO super-middleweight bout is now off after the organising body refused to sanction the King's Hall bout.

The WBO invoked their 60-day ruling on Calzaghe, which says their champions are not allowed to take another fight within that period before their mandatory title defence.

Promoters Sports Network had hoped that the rule could have been waived for their champion, who has made a British record 16 defences of the super-middleweight title.

But they have been told his mandatory challenge takes precedence and now Calzaghe must prepare for number one contender Mario Veit on or before May 7 - having already knocked the German out in 112 seconds back in 2001. Had he refused, he faced being stripped of the title he took off Chris Eubank seven years ago.

It means Eamonn Magee's comeback fight against Denmark's Allan Vester now tops the bill, live on Sky Sports.

But the late call-off is the latest in series of body blows for Calzaghe, who has seen his career stutter due to injuries and the break-up of his marriage.

The Magee clash would have been only his fourth fight in the last 21 months and in that time he has missed out on a light-heavyweight showdown with Glen Johnson - who went on to beat Roy Jones Jnr - and struggled to an ugly win in his last fight against Kabary Salem having been put down in the fourth round.

Calzaghe has also seen Sheffield's Clinton Woods beat him to one of the four recognised light-heavy titles after his IBF win over Rico Hoye - and was then told he would have to wait in line for a crack at the new champion.

He also struggles to make the 168lb super-middleweight limit and is expected to move up in the near future - and as a WBO champion could well be fast-tracked into a showdown with his light-heavyweight counterpart, currently Hungary's Zsolt Erdei.

More immediately, the news means an unexpected top billing for another Magee, Eamonn.

The Belfast light-welterweight has not boxed for more than a year following a vicious street attack, but is looking to get his career back on track against Denmark's Allan Vester.

Vester has been in with the likes of Zab Judah and Gianluca Branco, but 33-year-old Magee is vowing to put on a show for his adoring public.

"People will be wondering whether I am back to my best but I will show them I am," he said. "I have come back from a lot and I'm ready to prove to the world that I'm back."

I'm not really bothered to be honest, it looked like an easy night for Calzaghe & I was looking forward to seeing EAMONN Magee's comeback fight more than the main event anyway

[rudy]

This is a disgrace Frank Warren and Calazaghe have become a joke. I would hate to be a ticket holder for the Hatton vs Tzsyu as u never what is going to happen.

This is not good business, Calzaghe should have taken the fight and vacant title rather than fight a bum he beat in 1 round, imagine the unthinkable and he loses in a rematch his career will be one complete joke, which is quite sad

[barryboy]

I fail to see who will get excited by a Calzaghe/Veit rematch except Veit's people, I mean who gets a rematch after being ktfo in 1 round I appreciate he's worked his way back but since then but still.
Calzaghe should give up that WBO belt and go for Clinton Woods' IBF title as it'd be a huge fight in Britain & if Joe won he'd be in a great position for 'big' fights as all he'll get fighting the Veit's of the world is a payday & nothing more.

[hardhitter]

i heard about eamonn and the street attack but does anyone no what actually happened, if it toko him 13 months to recover it must have been pretty bad ? i hope eamonn wins in style cos he deserves it coming back from that

[barryboy]

I saved this article about Magee not long ago, bit of a long read but it's good stuff. He's one hard bastard I wish him all the best for Friday good to have him back.

Streetfighting man

Four months ago, as he was preparing for a world title fight, Irish boxer Eamonn Magee was brutally beaten and had his legs broken in a street attack. Jamie Jackson met him in Belfast, where he talked about his violent life, his troubles with the IRA and his plans for an unlikely comeback

Hobbling on a crutch, his left foot in plaster, Eamonn Magee enters the 32 Degrees pub on the Ardoyne estate in north Belfast. He wears sunglasses, a pinstriped shirt and suit trousers. His nose is broken and he is accompanied by his minder, James, whose face is deeply scarred and who nowadays goes nearly everywhere Magee goes in Belfast. On the wall by the bar is a photograph of the 32 Degrees pub taken during the riots three years ago when Catholic parents were stoned by Protestants as they collected their children from the Holy Cross primary school on Ardoyne Road. 'I went to the Holy Cross as a young kid,' says Magee, as he drinks a pint of iced cider. 'Growing up in the Ardoyne, you become used to the violence. It was a normal part of life. You're young and, in a funny way, you enjoyed it. It was a crack. The kids who couldn't take it wouldn't have been out on the street. That's how hard it was.'

Magee could take it all right, and, more recently, has taken much worse on the street. On 29 February, just two months before he was due to fight Sharmba Mitchell for the International Boxing Federation Intermediary world title, one of the most important fights of his erratic 29-bout professional career, he alleges he was attacked in Blacks Road, Belfast. Whatever the truth (at the time of writing, the trial has yet to come to the courts), Magee suffered a broken left leg, fractured left knee, a punctured lung and underwent surgery to have muscle grafted on to his shattered limb.

Magee says that he was dragged from his car on Blacks Road and beaten repeatedly with a baseball bat. The accused, charged with grievous bodily harm, possession of a weapon and causing damage to a vehicle, denies any involvement.

At the time of the attack, Magee announced that he would never box again. But now, three months since his operation, he is confidently talking not only of a comeback but also of fighting before the end of the year.

'I'm three months ahead of where the doctor thought I would be,' he tells me. 'The two shins bone are healing - they were broken completely in half. The doctor said my cage [cast] would be on my leg for five months, but it was only on for two. The doctor is amazed by my progress. To be honest, I'm amazed as well. I put my rapid recovery down to being so fit.'

Eamonn Magee was born in Belfast on 13 July, 1971. He was five years old when he entered the gym at Sacred Hearts Parochial Hall on the Ardoyne in Belfast; he was seven when he had his first supervised fight, which he won. His maternal grandfather was a boxer and his three elder brothers were, in varying degrees, talented pugilists. But Magee was the truly gifted one: of his 29 professional fights to date, he has lost only four. He won both the Commonwealth and European light welterweight titles and became World Boxing Union welterweight champion last December.

'Eamonn was on the fringes of being world class,' says former World Boxing Association featherweight champion and fellow Irish boxer, Barry McGuigan. 'Magee is a southpaw, his style is all about slick counterpunching. He draws his opponents on and then nails them. He's fast-handed, a sharp but not a devastating puncher. But he's certainly a forceful hitter, as he proved against Ricky Hatton.'

Hatton, who last month made his 13th defence of his WBU light-welterweight title, knows all about the Belfast man's strength and ability. Magee knocked the flat-nosed Mancunian down for the first time in 28 fights when they met on 1 June, 2002. (Hatton hung on and the fight went the distance, Magee losing on points). It was an impressive performance from Magee, especially when one considers his unorthodox training regime, his irregular diet and his drinking and his smoking.

'I would say Eamonn Magee is the most gifted Irish boxer ever,' says his trainer John Breen, with forgivable loyalty. 'The trouble is, Eamonn never really prepares properly for fights. The only way you will ever get him to train properly is to put him in a monastery for eight weeks. A month before the Hatton fight I found out he was skipping his roadwork, that he was drinking. He's not dedicated. He could have beaten Ricky Hatton but he just didn't try hard enough.'

McGuigan agrees that Magee lacks the unswerving commitment to the cause that all true champions require. 'He's had many good fights in the past but he just hasn't made it work in the ones that matter,' McGuigan says. 'He didn't go for the kill against Oktay Urkal [Magee lost a unanimous decision to the Turkish fighter for the European light welterweight title in Germany in June 2003] and he didn't kill off Hatton when he had the chance.

'I don't think his temperament has done him any favours. He's a surly, truculent guy, [but] he's a good thinker in the ring, he has a good boxing brain. If he hadn't such a tendency to hold back, then he might have had more success in the important fights.'

If there is a strong sense among the boxing community that Magee has wasted his talent, the boxer himself candidly admits to some 'lost years'. In 1992, for instance, on the eve of the Barcelona Olympics, he quit boxing. Informed by the Irish selectors that, if he wanted to go to Barcelona, he had to fight an opponent he had already defeated, Magee, with characteristic restraint, told them to 'stick it up their arse.' Having won silver at the world junior championships three years earlier, Magee knows he was capable of a good performance in Barcelona: 'I was on top of my game then, flying, who knows what I could've done?' Like so much in his blighted life, it was not to be.

The Irish selectors, however, were not the only reason he walked away from the ring. 'Back then, I was with the wrong crowd, going off the rails, doing all sorts,' he says. In 1994, Magee was involved in a bar brawl in Belfast. 'It was after watching a Celtic-Rangers match one day on TV,' he tells me. 'There was five of us and five Rangers supporters in a city centre bar. There were bottles, chairs, fists flying. The whole thing was caught on CCTV and we were all prosecuted. I was charged with affray.'

Magee is an edgy character, who frequently appears anxious during the time we spend together in Belfast. His stories seem tailored to impress, yet for all that, he appears to skirt around the truth and, I think, is not always straight-forward. In October 1989, he nearly died following a street fight. 'Some guys asked me for a cigarette outside a pizza place on the Ardoyne Road. I knew they wanted trouble. Then, suddenly, they started on me. I was hit by a broken bottle in the throat. I pushed my four fingers down deep into the wound to stem the bleeding. It was only a quarter inch away from my jugular. If they'd hit that, I would have been gone.'

Three years later, in 1992, Magee was pinned to the ground by IRA activists and shot in the thigh. The reasons for 'punishment' attacks such as these are well known in Belfast. Repeated burglary, joy riding, drug dealing and stealing cars are all high on the list of punishable misdemeanours. But when I ask him about the IRA attack, Magee will say only that he was 'up to no good,' as if he feels that he deserved such an attack.

It was while growing up on the Ardoyne estate, during the hunger strikes of the early 1980s, that Magee first realised he had the talent to escape, that boxing could offer him a potential way out from a life of crime and poverty. 'I box because it's the only thing I know how to do,' he says now. 'It's the only thing I can make a real living from. And until I got out of here through boxing, I never realised there was a world away from the violence of the street. But, let me tell you, boxing is the ****ing hardest game in the world, and the one with the lowest wages. It controls your life, and the lives of your wife and kids, too. They all have to look after you, mood swings and all. When you're trying to make the weight before a fight you are not a happy person.'

As I leave him, standing up at the bar, watched by his minder, James, he says, with a note of defiance: 'Other people couldn't handle it they way I have. They'd just crawl up in a corner and die. I'm not going to. I'm going to get back in the ring. I'll show them what I can do, that I can win again.'