Carl Froch can make real name for himself

Times Online Ron Lewis1st October, 2009

No sooner had Carl Froch got the chip off his shoulder about Joe Calzaghe than his career went into overdrive.

Froch, the WBC super-middleweight champion, has spent most of his career calling out the former undefeated world champion, but is discovering that there is plenty of life after the Welshman's retirement.

While Calzaghe is leaden-footedly shuffling around the Strictly Come Dancing studio, Froch has had a series of dream bouts laid out before him. In Nottingham yesterday, Froch stood alongside Mikkel Kessler, the Danish WBA champion whose only career defeat was by Calzaghe in 2007, a win regarded by many as the best of Calzaghe's career.

Both are competing in the Super Six, a tournament organised by Showtime, the US television station, that is regarded as the most exciting innovation in world boxing since the heavyweight tournament that made Mike Tyson undisputed world champion in the Eighties. Froch may never have got Calzaghe into the ring, but he has got everybody else.

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"I want to fight the best, I want to be recognised in the top three pound-for-pound, alongside [Floyd] Mayweather," Froch said. "If I fight nobodies, I'm never going to get anywhere."

Froch's place in the tournament is reward for his dramatic last-round win over Jermain Taylor, the former world champion, in the United States in April, which turned Froch into a star. He starts his campaign on October 17 against Andre Dirrell, an unbeaten former Olympic medal-winner from Michigan, at Nottingham's Trent FM Arena. After that, Froch is set to face Kessler in March, followed by Arthur Abraham, the former IBF middleweight champion from Germany.

Kessler begins his Super Six campaign against Andre Ward, a US Olympic gold medal-winner, in Oakland, California, next month. Taylor is the other boxer in the tournament.

After three bouts each, the tournament will conclude with semi-finals and a final. Froch and Kessler believe that there is every possibility that they will be meeting twice. "The prospect of fighting Kessler twice is a daunting one, but exciting," Froch *said. "I'm not getting what I deserve as a world champion because of the TV situation, but I'm doing something I love."

Television, or lack of it, particularly on the BBC, is a topic that has raised tempers within the sport of late. Froch's bout against Dirrell will be shown on Primetime, a pay-per-view network that launches on the Sky platform on October 8.

"The BBC is licence-payers' money and they are being robbed," Froch said. "If they put boxing on at a decent time, they will get four million viewers. It's a disgrace."

Bookmakers have made Froch a narrow favourite to win the tournament, but with such a run of big bouts before him, he says that there is no chance of him taking Dirrell, the outsider, lightly. "He has to be taken seriously," Froch, 32, said. "He's unbeaten, ambitious and they blow smoke up their a*** in America, telling them they're the next Sugar Ray Leonard. He'll believe he can win the title.

"But all that goes out of the window after round one. I punch hard for 12 rounds, so we'll find out what he's got. I would not like his job, coming to my home town to try and take my title."

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