BoxRec

March 2, 2008

Packing a punch

Saturday will see a battle of the knockout kings when David Haye fights Enzo Maccarinelli in London Brian Doogan
There’s a lot to love about Jerry’s,” they suggest on the menu in the popular restaurant and deli on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, but David Haye ignores their “more than 600 delicious items” and orders plain oatmeal with fruit. No sugar, no syrup, no milk. It is almost 1pm and this is his first meal of the day, washed down by hot water and freshly squeezed lemon juice.

“I’ll do a light [training] session this afternoon, nothing major because this is my day off, and I’ll eat some roast chicken after that, a bit of boiled rice and no sauce,” he reveals. “Your body doesn’t need sauces and nice-tasting stuff and you can train your taste buds to do without the flavouring. You just get used to it.

“Some people couldn’t eat this bowl of porridge without a load of sugar and jam. It’s about training your brain to accept that food is fuel, nothing more. It’s not about the taste.”

Not for a fighter who is carefully manipulating his body down to 14st 4lb when his natural weight – “if I had a regular job” – might be 17st. On this day he weighs 14st 13lb but he has 16 days to shed the surplus 9lb before he steps on the scales ahead of the first defence of his world cruiserweight title against his Welsh-Italian challenger, Enzo Maccarinelli. Win or lose, it will also be his last, for the process of making the cruiserweight limit is too debilitating. When he stepped away from the ring at the Palais des Sports Marcel Cerdan in Paris last November, relieved to have survived a knockdown before stopping Jean-Marc Mormeck, he acknowledged he was “very weight drained”. He had not eaten a proper meal for 17 weeks and in the 10 days before the bout had been forced to lose 14lb. “Nobody knows the agonies I went through,” he declared with a candour untypical of the majority of boxers but typical of him.

“It was worth it to win these belts [The Ring’s, the World Boxing Council’s and the World Boxing Association’s] but I cannot defend them. The danger to my health is too great. The biggest risk of brain damage comes when boxers are dehydrated. Come the fight, my body was at no more than 65 to 70% efficiency. It was a risk I took – just one time. The way people get brain damage is when they are violently dehydrated, so what’s the point of having money if you end up in hospital because of it?”

Yet here he is, sitting opposite his trainer, Adam Booth, poking at a half-full bowl of oatmeal, looking almost lethargic as he explains why he has postponed his move into the heavyweight division. allegedly, the promoter, is paying him £1m, but there are greater riches to be earned as a heavyweight and the risk is that more than his bubble might be burst by Maccarinelli. Between them, they have knocked out or stopped 42 of their 50 opponents, so the loser at the O2 Arena is likely to be dazed and significantly diminished as a fighter when the battle culminates in the early hours next Sunday.

Does a £1m purse make this a chance worth taking for the 27-year-old Londoner? Is the danger to his health too great as he boils down to the 200lb limit one more time? If his legs went when Mormeck connected with his jaw in the fourth round, will he be able to withstand even harder blows to his chin?

“I’ve taken this fight because I know I punch harder than Maccarinelli, I’m faster than him and I’ve fought better opponents,” Haye declares. “Nobody can take my punches for 12 rounds. Maccarinelli’s used to dishing out beatings because of the calibre of opposition he’s fought and he could probably tee off on me for 12 rounds. But he’s going to get hit in the face – hard – and it’s not easy to load up on your shots when you’re constantly being punched in the head and can feel your teeth getting pushed back into your mouth. It’s not easy when your eyes are shutting up and your nose is busted.

“My weight was an issue before the Mormeck fight because I had to come down from 230 (16st 6lb) but the highest I went up after the fight was 218 (15st 8lb), so it hasn’t been as difficult this time. I don’t feel I’m putting myself at risk. If I did, I’d have said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ and moved up to heavyweight. If I’m as good as I think I am, I can beat anybody at heavyweight and that will be my goal after I beat Maccarinelli.” Maccarinelli, holder of the World Boxing Organisation cruiserweight title, is a reformed character since he linked up with trainer Enzo Calzaghe almost two years ago. As a Swansea teenager, he thought he could live the life and allow his prodigious power to take care of business in the ring. “I had a fight with a doorman on a night out in Swansea and he came off worst because I was drunk and, to my mind, I was performing,” he reflects. The embarrassment of losing to journeyman Lee Swaby forced him to change his ways. “That was the turning point,” he insists. “I was drinking and doing things fighters shouldn’t be doing, so I said to myself I wasn’t going to be another boy who could have made it but didn’t because I f***** up.” In his first fight under Calzaghe, he won the interim WBO title by stopping Argentina’s Marcelo Dominguez and has won four fights since, the best result being a 12-round decision over the American Wayne Braithwaite last year. Calzaghe has transformed him into a fluid and accomplished boxer.

“Forget about Haye’s punch,” Calzaghe says. “They can all punch and they can all get hit but Enzo can go 12 rounds and Haye has a problem with that. The best thing he can do is go down early and go up to heavyweight because he will get damaged in this fight, no doubt.”