Joe Calzaghe brushes off the hard knocks

Downstairs from the casino suite where Elvis Presley got hitched to Priscilla, Bernard Hopkins launched into his old jailhouse rock routine about how his brutal experiences in prison a generation ago and the stabbings he'd suffered as a delinquent robber meant he'd been to "dark places" which a nice Welsh boy could never comprehend.

Only this time, the nice Welsh boy was sitting about three yards away listening to the showman's endless lyrics and he'd had enough of hearing how he was cut from a "different cloth, a dangerous cloth" which would make him handle anything that Joe Calzaghe could throw at him here in their light-heavyweight super fight this Saturday.

"Keep talking, man, put your teeth back in. You'll need some new teeth after Saturday night because you've picked on the wrong southpaw, mate," snapped Calzaghe, his patience exhausted after Hopkins had turned their pre-fight head-to-head in Las Vegas into a monologue of self-worship.

It was time, he'd clearly decided, to let Hopkins know that even if the streets of Newbridge weren't quite as mean as those of east Philadelphia, Hopkins's past as a survivor was going to have absolutely no connection to his future as a victim. So, raising the stakes for the first time, he told Hopkins he wasn't just going to beat him but was going to be the first man ever to knock out the American in his 20-year career.

"I've had to listen to three hours of Hopkins saying all this same old stuff," moaned Calzaghe, who didn't even have to endure Hopkins's post-conference oratory when he was comparing himself with both Gandhi and Malcolm X.

"But he had to go to prison to make himself hard because he was weak. I was born hard and I'm gonna make a grown man cry. He keeps talking about prison, big deal."

This daft 'I'm harder than you' stuff is familiar pre-fight fare but you can sense Calzaghe's antipathy growing with every close encounter and maybe it's part of the Hopkins masterplan - to get the Welshman so riled that he rushes out in the Thomas and Mack Center and gets embroiled in the sort of roughhouse which looks Hopkins's only realistic passport to victory at 43.

Calzaghe's nearly blown it before like this. "A few years ago I don't think I'd have had the right temperament for this fight. In some, like against [Sakio] Bika and [Kabary] Salem, I'd come out like a bull out of a gate and it would affect me," he said. "Not any more. I'm more disciplined, I'm ready.