Melvina Lathan had all but lost her voice. The chairperson of the New York State Athletic Commission had spent the previous day helping to get the vote out for Barack Obama, driving senior citizens to polling stations and cheering herself hoarse as the results came in. Now she was at the microphone in a Manhattan hotel room, using what remained of her vocal cords to introduce a couple of men whose appointment with history takes place tonight.
A former boxing judge who was at ringside for more than 80 championship fights and became the first African-American woman member of the commission a year ago, Lathan could not resist an allusion to the previous evening's euphoria. "I'm sorry I can't talk too much," she told the pre-fight press conference. "Last night I screamed myself out. But now, on the tailwinds of one of the most profound events in our country's history, comes Calzaghe-Jones."
Well, maybe. Until he fell to the fists of Antonio Tarver in Las Vegas four years ago, Roy Jones Jr certainly justified his status as the world's best pound-for-pound fighter. Now, at 39 years of age, on a run of three consecutive wins, he still commands a measure of respect and will need careful watching by his opponent. But Joe Calzaghe? Where, exactly, is the 36-year-old Welsh southpaw's place in history?
A professional record of 45 unbeaten fights over 15 years should speak for itself. Were he to beat Jones at Madison Square Garden tonight in his defence of the Ring magazine world light-heavyweight title, Calzaghe would be only three wins away from Rocky Marciano's record of calling it a day after 49 fights without defeat. Neither he nor his father and trainer, Enzo, would talk about retirement this week, but at least one expert believes that the widely predicted victory over Jones would be a good place to stop.
"It would be time to get out," Emanuel Steward, the legendary trainer of Thomas Hearns and Lennox Lewis, said yesterday shortly after arriving in New York, where he will commentate for HBO on tonight's events at the Garden. "What more can he accomplish? He's at the top. It's over. If he beats Jones and retires, he'll have that unbeaten record and his legend can only grow day by day as the years go by."
Calzaghe's deeds won him the BBC's sports personality of the year award last December, when voters impressed by the points victory over Mikkel Kessler that gave him the undisputed super-middleweight title in Cardiff's Millennium Stadium.
His deeds over time have won him an MBE. But there has been a sense that his reluctance to venture outside the UK - the exceptions being his bouts with Mario Veit in Germany in 2005 and with Bernard Hopkins in Las Vegas in April this year - delayed his chance to cement his reputation in the US.
"He's a very respected fighter here," said Steward, who particularly admired Calzaghe's performance in Manchester in March 2006, when he took the US fighter Jeff Lacy's titles away by winning 11 of the 12 rounds, only a deducted point causing him to forfeit the 12th. "What he did that night was one of the most talked-about performances in recent boxing folklore. He's a highly intelligent and quick-witted man, verbally and in the ring. He fights well at a distance and he can get up close and slip in short punches, and he breaks up the rhythm. His volume of punches is extraordinary - everybody knows that - but it's not just rat-a-tat stuff. He's hard to anticipate. And his condition is always second to none - he's been fit and strong for all his fights, which is unusual."
Bert Sugar, the legendary fedora-wearing, cigar-smoking, wisecracking 72-year-old former editor of Ring magazine, recently published a book - one of his dozens - in which he ranked the 100 greatest fighters of all time. But even with the benefit of a perspective that started to form in 1941 when, as a small boy in Washington DC, he saw Joe Louis beat Buddy Baer, he finds it difficult to place Calzaghe in boxing's pantheon.
"I'm a big fan of Joe," Sugar said, "but there were eight traditional weight divisions, but now there are 17 and there's a particular problem gauging the guys in what I call the halfway houses - super-this, junior-that. So Joe Calzaghe is better than any of the other super-middleweights. What is that - six people? The business of fighting across the pond is not such a problem. It's that we don't know who the hell, with the exception of Jeff Lacy, these people are that he's been fighting. That's your standard. Not where, who. You've got to be able to make the comparison. Now that he's fighting light-heavyweight I can look at an Archie Moore, I can look at a Bobby Foster, et cetera.
"Joe is an earnest, hard-working, out-hustling, out-muscling fighter. He has very brittle hands but his work rate is reminiscent of people like Henry Armstrong. It's just constant. He's moving, he's working, and in this fight you have to remember that Jones has always had trouble with left-handers. I think Jones will give him a fight for a while but I'm looking at Calzaghe to overwhelm him."
Calzaghe had an eye on posterity when he nominated the historic venue and an opponent who has held world titles in four different weight divisions, but there is just about enough uncertainty in the air to make tonight's dispute between two veterans a compelling prospect, not least because we may be seeing one or both of them for the last time.
"Which Joe will turn up?" Enzo Calzaghe asked this week. "Even I don't know. Will it be the brawler, as he's shown on a few occasions? Will it be the master craftsman we saw against Jeff Lacy? Will it be the charismatic fighter? What I do know is that he will not, in any circumstances, fail at the last hurdle."
