IBF super-middleweight champion will face Mikel Kessler
on Saturday night, tasked with beating the man who handed Froch his first
defeat
Last year I saw Vitali Klitschko asking Lennox Lewis for
a chance at redemption, the opportunity to clear his head of the memory that
was haunting him by granting a rematch.
The pair met in a pitiless blood-fest in Los Angeles in
2003 (below) when Klitschko was rescued, in what looked like a scene from an
abattoir, after six rounds of their world heavyweight title fight. His face was
shredded but his desire was as strong as ever. At the time of the stoppage all
three judges had Klitschko in front by two points. “Vitali still wants a
rematch and now his wife has started to ask me to fight him one more time!”
said Lewis. The rematch will never happen – because Lewis is retired for good
and not because it was too many years ago.
Bernard Hopkins waited 17 years for his rematch with Roy
Jones Jr and, just like Klitschko, thought about the first fight all the time.
“It never left my mind. Never. I wanted revenge, I wanted a chance to win and
that is why I chased Roy for a rematch,” said Hopkins.
In the first fight in 1993, Jones was arguably America’s
biggest attraction, a hero from the 1988 Seoul Olympics who had been
disgracefully denied gold by officials who had been wined and dined when they
shouldn’t have. Jones was being groomed to be world champion, he was on a roll
and seemingly unbeatable – and Hopkins was still serving out the iniquitous
terms of his parole following years in prison. Jones won a cagey fight over 12
rounds, and a world title.
In 2010, Hopkins gained revenge and won easily against
Jones, who had not survived the years of weight-making and hard fights in the
ring with enough to bother the extraordinary “Executioner”. “It felt good. Make
no mistake, it was worth the wait,” he confirmed.
Not all boxers are as patient as Hopkins and when George
Foreman quit the ring in 1977, following an epiphany in the dressing room after
Jimmy Young had beaten him, the refusal of Muhammad Ali to give him a rematch
remained a significant factor.
In the “Rumble in the Jungle” in 1974 Foreman had been
exposed by Ali the veteran and left grasping to make sense of the personal
disaster long into the African night. “Big George”, who eventually drifted deep
into the church to escape the ignominy, had taken out full-page ads in major
American newspapers to try to shame Ali into a rematch. “Nothing worked, he was
never going to fight me again,” Foreman said.
In 1987 Foreman returned leaner and meaner and exorcised
many of the demons left by Ali’s fists when he regained the world heavyweight
title in 1994. He had his crown back but not the thing he wanted most: a
rematch with Ali.
On Saturday, at a sold-out O2 Arena, London, Carl Froch
has the perfect rematch when he meets Denmark’s Mikkel Kessler. They will each
enter the ring as world champions, both are still in or close to their primes
and memories of their brilliant first fight in Herning, Denmark, close to the
Lego capital of the world, in 2010 are still fresh.
“So many great rematches have been lost over the years
and that is why I pushed so hard for this,” said Froch, who is arguably a bit
fresher than Kessler in ring years. “I knew that it had to happen, it made
sense and I will not make any mistakes this time.” Froch will find out, just
like Hopkins said, that it is most certainly worth the wait. (Read the originalstory)
