David Haye has been a gambler all
his life. Now, 11 months out from his self-imposed finishing line, the
30-year-old WBA champion finds the odds moving perceptibly his way as he seeks
to unify the world heavyweight championship for the first time since Lennox
Lewis held the three major belts 11 years ago.
Haye hopes to go one better,
collecting the WBC, WBO and IBF titles to go with the WBA version he kept safe
in a withering third-round dismissal of Audley Harrison’s cardboard resistance
in the MEN Arena in Manchester on Saturday night. It would be an unprecedented
and remarkable achievement, even in a seriously devalued era. He is determined
to do it before he turns 31 next October.
If Haye wants his friends to wander
into the bookmakers today and back him to fulfil the dream he has been chasing
since he was a boy in Bermondsey, the odds on offer are 7-1 – not as crazy an
investment as it sounds. Haye, a small man in a big man’s world, has never
shirked a challenge.
His explosive battering of Harrison
(43lbs heavier, three inches taller, with an eight-inch reach advantage) after
two rounds of peace negotiations will have alerted the other title-holders,
Wladimir and Vitali Klitschko, to the growing threat he poses to their
hegemony.
From one perspective, though, it
might make business that much harder to do than it has already proved in their
tortured negotiations over the past 18 months.
The Ukrainian brothers’ manager,
Bernd Bonte, has repeated his mantra that there will be no unification fights
unless Haye agrees to an even split of all worldwide revenues.
Haye’s manager, Adam Booth, says he
has always been amenable to a 50:50 division of the money – but Bonte and his
clients fear Haye will make a killing with Sky Sports and their powerful
pay-per-view engine, while they will not earn anywhere near as much with their
German free-to-air broadcaster, RTL.
But such is the excitement Haye’s
fights generate compared with the sleep-inducing bouts the Klitschkos have been
involved in recently, that the charismatic Londoner brings more than mere belts
to the table. He has box-office clout.
“I will do everything in my power
to make these fights happen,” Haye said after putting the finishing touches to
Harrison’s hugely disappointing professional career. He hinted at compromise,
also, when he said in answer to suggestions he should give a little ground: “It
depends on what a smaller purse is.”
So, there is genuine hope that we
will be delivered at least a year of dramatic heavyweight action before the
boxing business returns to chaos.
Any fall-out from Haye’s admission
that he advised family and friends to back him to win in round three, delaying
the execution for that purpose, is a mere distraction to those talks, because
these are the fights the sport and the fans deserve.
When the boos and cheers faded on
Saturday night, Haye embraced Harrison in the corridors of the arena, although
the latter’s woeful performance did not warrant sympathy. “What did I say to
him?” Haye said. “Nothing like the stuff I was saying the past few weeks.”
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