Dan Rafael Blog
Haye's talk was cheap, his hands idle
July, 2, 2011
Like the other nine guys who Wladimir Klitschko has defended the heavyweight title against, David Haye promised he would end the champion's reign.
In fact, the mouthy Haye talked and jabbered and howled and smack-talked for much of the past three years, promising to do all sorts of naughty things to Klitschko.
Promised to leave him twitching on the ring mat, the victim of a crushing knockout. Promised the most brutal execution ever.
Promised a lot of things.
Delivered nothing.
All that Haye -- one of the biggest heavyweight frauds of all time -- did was bark. Like a dog. Because he sure didn't fight much, as Klitschko -- as dominant as ever at age 35 -- picked him apart for the lopsided decision on Saturday in rainy Hamburg, Germany.
It was not a scintillating fight. Far from it. But Klitschko did what he usually does: outbox, outjab, outmuscle and outthink his opponent en route to total domination.
The only thing Klitschko didn't do was score the knockout -- only the second time in this, his second reign, that the opponent has heard the final bell.
Haye made it to the bell because he took none of the chances he promised he would. Instead, he fought scared.
As Klitschko said afterward, "I wish I could have knocked him out impressively. He was scared to fight me. I was expecting more of a challenge in the ring, more aggression. He was super-defensive, like all of them."
After all of the garbage and trash Haye talked, he never came close to backing it up. He said repeatedly that he would retire after the fight. It looked more to me like he retired during the first round, because he didn't really fight.
After the fight, I was thinking about what excuse Haye would come up with. I figured he'd say he had a hand injury. I was close: He claimed to have a broken toe on his right foot that didn't allow him to push off and land his so-called "Hayemaker" right hand.
Excuses, excuses, excuses.
Every fighter has injuries. Few come to the ring without bumps and bruises from a tough training camp. I'm sure Klitschko was also dinged up.
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But given the way Haye has always handled himself, I am not surprised at all that he had an alibi at the ready, so much so that he came to his interview in the ring after the fight with HBO's legendary Larry Merchant with his sock already off so that the camera could get a good look at his allegedly injured digit.
It looked OK to me, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say it was injured. If so, take the loss like a man and shut up about it.
There is no Toe-gate here. Haye was simply outclassed by a supreme champion who still has not been challenged to any serious degree since 2005.
Against Haye, Klitschko won 118-108, 117-109 and 116-110. I also had it 118-108. And Haye, who continually flopped to the ground -- I lost track of how many times, frankly -- to buy a point deduction from referee Geno Rodriguez, complaining that Klitschko shoved him to the mat, finally got one in the seventh round. It was a bogus deduction, but Rodriguez fell for it.
But even Rodriguez realized he was being conned, so when Haye flopped again in the 11th round, the ref ruled it a knockdown. It's not like Klitschko needed the extra point. He was cruising.
He landed 134 of 509 punches (26 percent), according to CompuBox. Haye's output was downright pathetic: just 72 of an anemic 290 blows (26 percent).
You can't win if you don't throw. And Haye didn't throw.
I find that funny because, all along, Haye has called Klitschko a boring fighter. And yet on this night, the biggest of his career, Haye was the one who disgraced himself by making it boring, by running away, by not engaging, by not doing much of anything.
Well, except for making excuses about a hurt toe.
So it was Klitschko with another dominant win, a 10th title defense (one more than the prime Mike Tyson during his first run) and now a fourth sanctioning body title in the family. Klitschko and brother Vitali now own all four major belts.
Three for Wladimir and one for Vitali, with no serious challengers on the horizon. (I say that with all due respect to Tomasz Adamek, who I don't give much of a chance against Vitali on Sept. 17. But I know he will at least leave it all in the ring unlike Haye.)
Folks can say whatever they want about the Klitschko brothers, but they win and win and win. They dominate.
Some people want them out of boxing because they aren't the most exciting fighters. Fine. Go find somebody to beat them.
Lord knows, Haye sure talked like he would. Talked and talked and talked.
But his talk turned out not only to be cheap. It was worthless.
