Remember when Joe Calzaghe said recently that he had offered Kelly Pavlik a fight after Calzaghe defeated Jeff Lacy?

And, see, I thought, "Wow, really? That's amazing that the super middleweight world champion would offer a title fight to a totally untested American middleweight that nobody had ever heard of."

Not that this would be totally out of wack for Joe Cool's career, the fighting competition that anyone would see and think, "Well that's not a very good opponent, is it?"

Plus, there's the fact that he's probably making that up entirely, and that it never happened. Pavlik says it never happened.

While hyping his upcoming fight with 39-year old Roy Jones, Jr., as "the real deal," Calzaghe took a moment to shoot some more B.S. toward Pavlik and crew.

"But let’s take nothing away from this fight. People talk about Kelly Pavlik, but who is he? In 10 years time nobody is going to care about him."

...

"Pavlik is an over-rated fighter, he can punch but he is one-dimensional."

Really nothing new, I know. But let's consider this deeper than just the words.

Remember when Pavlik won the middleweight championship from Jermain Taylor? Right about one year ago, Joe Calzaghe was all kinds of complimentary toward Pavlik, congratulating him on his win and inviting him to Cardiff as his guest for Calzaghe's fight with Mikkel Kessler. What's changed?

Calzaghe later goes on to say that Roy Jones has proven in his last three fights that he's back, and that "you're only as good as your last fight."

In Jones' last three fights, he's beaten Prince Badi Ajamu, Anthony Hanshaw and an old, washed-up, rusty, inflated, flabby Felix Trinidad. Ajamu and Hanshaw don't even get to enter that "10 years from now" argument -- they're more like 10 minutes from now no one will know who they are.

Pavlik has beaten Jermain Taylor in a slugfest, Jermain Taylor in a boxing match, and then he obliterated Gary Lockett to the degree that Calzaghe's father was forced to wave the white flag.

I get selling fights. I get the hype. What annoys me about these things is you can talk trash without making yourself look bad, can't you? Calzaghe struggles with this.

"He sucks, he's no good." So why did you supposedly want to fight him well before ANYONE knew who he was? Before Pavlik beat Miranda or Taylor or anyone except Fulgencio Zuniga, frankly, Calzaghe says he wanted to fight him. He wanted to fight a middleweight with no track record. What a man's man! What a champion!

Then he wanted to fight him a year ago when Pavlik won the middleweight championship, which came to nothing. Again, what a champion. What a credit to the sport.

Calzaghe does nothing but make himself look awful when he talks about Kelly Pavlik. Maybe he should stop, and focus on the Seniors Tour he's currently on. Then perhaps he can go back to talking about retiring, having accomplished all that is possible thanks to a handful of good wins, and I still consider Kessler the best victory of his career (not the biggest, which would be Hopkins, or the most important, which would be the genuinely overrated Jeff Lacy).

I try to like Joe because I think he's a super fighter, the best 168-pounder ever, and that he was too long not given enough credit by the American public and the American media. But he's kind of annoying. "Kind of" is an understatement lately.

He'll mop up the ancient Jones, retire, and come out of retirement to fight Pavlik. Then, win or lose, he'll go, "Ah, he was a tough opponent. He's a great fighter." He'll be great if Calzaghe decides to fight him. If Calzaghe doesn't, he won't be.

At this point, I hope for the fight and openly root for Kelly Pavlik to knock him out, which I'm not saying would be any easy task.

I guess my point is, do your hype RIGHT. Hype Jones on his last three fights. Maybe someone will buy into that. But don't include the far more impressive Kelly Pavlik and try to sell me on Prince Badi Ajamu over Jermain Taylor.