Joe Calzaghe follows Rocky road to greatness

No, but you can emulate it. In New York's Yankee Stadium 53 years ago, heavyweight king Marciano dismantled a dangerous veteran Archie Moore and then walked away from boxing for good as champion and with his record unblemished after 49 fights.

Now, in another of the city's iconic venues, another unbeaten fighter of Italian descent vows to subdue another menacing 39-year-old former champ and call it a day at Madison Square Garden with the perfect record: fought 46, won 46.

"Marciano is a hero to me because you can't put a price on an unbeaten record and he had the strength never to be tempted out of retirement," said Calzaghe, who fancies that beating a four-weight world champ Roy Jones in a superfight at the Garden would be his own unsurpassable finale to his 11 years of supremacy.

The trouble is that, however hard he tries, the 36-year-old Welshman can't help making it sound as if beating Jones is going to be the easy part compared to the walking off into the sunset bit.

"This is where it ends," he booms one minute. Yet then, when asked about the prospect of Bernard Hopkins's camp offering daft money for a rematch, he'll shrug: "That's different."

When we chatted at his gym in Abercarn, he laughed as he was given numerous ideas of why he should continue his career should he retain his world light-heavyweight title.

Like ending his career in front of 50,000 Cardiff fans. "No."

Or securing another massive pay-day courtesy of Hopkins. "No." Or going on to try to beat Marciano's 49 straight wins, making it 50 and out. "No. I'm giving you the wrong answer here, aren't I?" he said.

"It would go totally against the grain for me to say I'll keep fighting for the money. The reason I've stayed champion was never down to money but to my hunger and dedication. I'm not going to risk my unbeaten record just for a few more million.

"As for beating Marciano's record, I wouldn't want to, I'm just as happy to end my career a few fights short of Joe Louis's record of 25 successful world title defences. I'm not greedy."

The fabled history of Madison Square Garden warns against such greed. Calzaghe knows that the ring in which he'll be fighting this weekend - albeit in a different location a mile down the road from the old MSG - is where Louis had one fight too many, being knocked through the ropes into retirement by a young Marciano.

Calzaghe reckoned he could feel the history when he first stepped foot inside the arena, feeling it was his "destiny" to end up here. As for the idea that it would be his last dance, though, all the noises coming out of New York this week, particularly from Calzaghe's dad, trainer Enzo, suggest otherwise.

"If there's no damage done to him and someone puts $20million on the table then I'm sure he'd seriously consider carrying on," said Enzo.

And should Calzaghe lose? There's a rematch clause for the Jones boy to come back to the Millennium Stadium.

Talking too much about life beyond Saturday, though, can only spell danger for Calzaghe because it assumes that no trace of Jones's unquestioned former brilliance exists. Yet Hopkins, who's been beaten by both, is not alone in believing that enough speed and power still resides in Jones to subdue Calzaghe's hailstorm workrate.

It's hard also to disagree with Jones's contention that all the pressure's on Calzaghe because "a loss for Joe would be much more significant to him . . . nothing that happens here can take away from my legacy."

One observation of Calzaghe's in Abercarn jarred most.

Pondering his two most brilliant wins, he said: "Something died in me after the [Jeff] Lacy and [Mikkel] Kessler fights . . .well, not died in me but I felt I'd done everything."

The subsequent loss of fire proved problematic against Hopkins and, if not rekindled against Jones, could yet make talk of doing a Rocky redundant.