If you want to lose weight, or just improve your diet, the best thing to do is ensure your fridge and cupboards are bare, or at least free from everything you crave. Out of sight, out of mind, logic dictates that without access to these treats you won’t be able to reach for them and will therefore be saved from yourself. You will be miserable in the short-term, that’s a given, but you will be considerably happier and healthier in the end.
The same applies to boxers in retirement. For most, it is incredibly difficult to give up something they have done since childhood; something that gives them their identity, routine, and some purpose. But this task is surely made all the more difficult if they stay close to the sport and try to fight temptation while encountering reminders of all they have lost.
Some, like Marvin Hagler, choose to run away – all the way to Italy, in his case – so as not to be lured back, yet most will stick around simply because in boxing circles they retain some relevance and importance. Without boxing, after all, these men and women become just civilians again, soon reminded of both their insignificance in the real world and how quickly a sport moves on.
For Joe Calzaghe, who retired in 2008, the temptation to fight again was initially strong before then fading until it became almost an impossibility on account of his age. Hit 50, you see, which the Welshman did two years ago, and the decision is effectively taken out of a boxer’s hands. A return becomes at that point not only an embarrassing thing to consider but also dangerous, ill-advised. Indeed, it is usually at that point, with the pressure off, a boxer starts to feel safe again; human again. It is usually at that point they feel more inclined to become involved in the sport, knowing that to get close again carries none of the threat of old. They might become a coach, for example. Or they might manage or promote. Or they might simply talk about the sport from ringside for a television broadcaster.
Calzaghe, unlike a lot of them, has so far shunned punditry, even coaching. He has, in fact, kept a relatively low-profile in retirement, just as he did while competing. There have been flirtations with popular television, including a spell on Strictly Come Dancing in 2009, but never once was there a sense that Calzaghe yearned to return to either the ring or the spotlight. We know of course that he has struggled without boxing, for that is well-documented, but he was also blessed by the fact that he had, in constructing a perfect 46-0 professional record, something of value to protect. He knew, in other words, that any return would potentially ruin perfection, this thing so many boxers chase but few are good enough to achieve.
Yet now, in 2025, the pull for a retired boxer is a little different; stronger. Now the kind of money it would take to have a boxer like Joe Calzaghe risk perfection is attainable in a way it never was before. Just as active fighters can now get rich quick thanks to the growing influence of Saudi Arabia, so too can retired fighters, those for whom the decision to stay retired is often as much to do with figures as the preserving of brain cells or good old common sense.
After all, if we know anything by now it is that everybody has a price. Find the right number and a journalist will become a publicist and tell the world how excellent everything is. Find the right number and a promoter will also happily give up the day job in favour of standing in the corner while watching other men do what they could not.
As for former fighters, the prospect of big money has never been as alluring or as dangerous as it is right now. Wladimir Klitschko, for instance, was almost tempted to return to the ring last year and may yet return at some stage in 2025. He is now 48, by the way. Then there is Calzaghe, a man four years older than Klitschko, who was apparently offered a fight with Carl Froch, 46, only to turn down the offer having initially shown interest. That’s according to Turki Alalshikh, the one who knows; the one who made the offer. He told Froch in an interview: “Last year I gave him an offer to fight you and he accepted. But the next day he changed his mind. It was with good numbers. I tried to convince him. But it is not an exhibition; this is real. Still I want to see this fight. He still wants it, but I think maybe his family…”
If indeed it was Calzaghe’s family who intervened, good for them – well done. Because the truth is, a fighter, especially a retired one, is only ever as strong and as sensible as the people around them. Left to their own devices and they are about as trustworthy as a dog near groceries or a child left alone with paint.
Even someone like Calzaghe, who has come so far and done so well, would have no doubt been tempted were it not for the other voices around him. These voices typically belong to people who care about the fighter and who see them as more than just a body and head to hit and a name to market and promote. They see them every day. They know both the damage boxing has done and the damage it is still waiting to do.
People like Alalshikh, on the other hand, are not privy to the same insight, which makes the idea of them interfering in a man’s progression through life a tough one to comprehend. For while, yes, in one respect he is showing great generosity in both thinking of Calzaghe and offering him a payday, he is also filling with ice cream and cake the fridge shelves and cupboards of a morbidly obese glutton fighting so hard to say “no”.
In the end, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, there is really no need to coax bad decisions from boxers in retirement, for they are more than capable of making them on their own. In fact, any attempt to do so suggests only a lack of compassion and understanding on the part of the one trying – the enabler, the fixer, the dealer. If you truly care for them, detach with love; something as true of boxers as it is addicts.
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