NEWBRIDGE, Wales -- In the valleys here just north of Cardiff, unknown to the world until a recent bit of fame trickled in, two men have been conducting one of those daunting earthly experiments.
Yet again, an irascible father has trained his irascible son in the emotionally freighted pursuit of boxing, and although this act of near-lunacy occurs fairly often in the sport, these two have been at it for almost three decades, attempting to refrain from strangling one another.
If you listen to them mine the British lexicon, you will hear they've grown routinely tetchy with each other. They've even gotten narky. They do have their barneys, and in these barneys they use language downright Scorseseian.
In his autobiography "No Ordinary Joe," the 36-year-old boxer wrote: "I infuriate him, and he infuriates me."
And the father? "I ignite him," said the Sardinian-Italian Enzo Calzaghe, 58, who talks fast, walks fast, eats fast and lives so fast he says people ask if he's on cocaine, and who soon added, "He ignites me."
That day Joe saw a doctor in London and Enzo parked the car pretty much in Belgium so he wouldn't have to pay, and Joe muttered things that cannot appear in this family newspaper. That day they drove to a weigh-in in Cardiff, and Joe tried to tell Enzo to turn left, and Enzo told Joe something that cannot appear in this family newspaper, and Joe got out and walked. Those times Enzo would do Joe's bandages, and Joe would say, "Your hands are shaking," and Enzo would tell Joe something that cannot appear in this family newspaper.
On and on, tetchy and narky and barneys, playing cards thrown against walls after cheating each other, Enzo storming off so often that if you're lucky he'll give you an impersonation of himself storming off, Joe boxing beginning at age 8 with Enzo always the trainer. And the upshot?
Joe is 44-0 as a professional. He hasn't lost since the European junior championships in Prague in 1990 when his bloody headguard kept slipping. He won the WBO super-middleweight title in 1997 and defended it 21 times.
He throttled vaunted American Jeff Lacy in 2006, and Britain voted Calzaghe the BBC sports personality of the year in 2007, a whole big deal here. And Enzo, who knew Joe Bugner in childhood but supposedly knew squat about boxing, well, he has seven various awards and six more accomplished fighters, which does spread out some of the tetchiness.
