By Ron Borges

He knew it all along but it wasn't until the wee hours of Sunday morning in Manchester, England that the best super middleweight in the world proved he was what he always said he was. It was only then that he finally made undeniable the fact that he was no ordinary Joe. Nearly 34-year-old Joe Calzaghe had waited all his professional life to prove this point to a skeptical world. He had once hoped to make his case at the expense of Bernard Hopkins or Roy Jones, Jr. but both eluded him for an assortment of reasons, few of his own making. But by 2:15 a.m. Sunday morning it was clear that his chance had come and he was going to take advantage of it.

By then the complete destruction of previously undefeated Jeff Lacy was underway. Calzaghe had opened their super middleweight unification fight at the MEN Arena in England's second largest city by thrashing the powerful Lacy in the first round, schooling him with combinations, battering him with hand speed like Lacy had never dealt with before and baffling him with slickness on the inside that would, within three rounds, leave Lacy's face a bloody mask of doubt and disappointment.

Calzaghe not only won every round of a unanimous 12-round decision, he won every minute of every round. Calzaghe's people had said they were unhappy at Lacy insisting on a 20-foot ring instead of the 22-foot one the WBO champion preferred but it would not have mattered whether the fight was held in a phone booth or somewhere on the vast Serengheti plain. There was no place on Earth where Jeff Lacy could have beaten Joe Calzaghe on March 5, including the United States, where the fight actually was televised on March 4th.

That's because everywhere Lacy went Calzaghe was already there blistering him with combinations or, if he chose to, he was already gone, having left Lacy windmilling ever more amateurish-looking hooks into the night air that Calzaghe slipped under and then countered. By the seventh round, Lacy was left to look like what Calzaghe and his father, Enzo, had insisted he was - a raw amateur baffled by how Calzaghe was destroying him and helpless to do anything but to endure it.

When Lacy tried to charge inside to launch the powerful left hook that had spawned his nickname and left 17 men broken inside the limit, Calzaghe either stopped him with a hard right jab, slipped under Lacy's punches and tied him up or nailed him with a left uppercut or quick combinations that time after time found a landing strip in the midst of Lacy's ever-swelling face.

This pattern was established from the first, a round Calzaghe dominated in stunning fashion. His superior handspeed was evident from the opening moment of the fight and Lacy's contention that Calzaghe (41-0) was "a slapper'' was belied by the bloody condition of his face after three rounds and the fact that he was staggered several times and dropped for the first time in his career in the final round.

Perhaps there was more Calzaghe could have done to make clear the dominance he had so long insisted should have been evident to the boxing world but after splitting both of Lacy's eye lids, badly bloodying his nose, causing the right side of his face to swell to the point where Lacy looked like half a gargoyle and consistently blistering him with hard combinations that had the IBF champion's head moving around like a bobble head doll's, it seemed even to Lacy that he'd done quite enough to make his point, thank you.

"He fought a perfect fight tonight,'' Lacy (21-1) said with the nobility of a man who had been beaten bloody but who had not lost his pride. "Sometimes you have to lose to gain. It was a learning experience for me. He's No. 1. He's the ringleader. I lost to a great champion. Maybe one day we can do it again.''

That's not likely because Calzaghe had long said it was time to move to 175 pounds and challenge for the light heavyweight title once he had been given the chance to make the case for himself as the dominate fighter at 168 pounds. Now that he's accomplished that he said he'd gladly come to the United States to take on someone like universally recognized light heavyweight champion Antonio Tarver, if such a fight could be made.

But that is a discussion for another day because Calzaghe was so decidedly dominate, so in command of every inch of real estate inside the ring, that it would be unseemly to move on too quickly from his glorious night of triumph on this his 18th consecutive defense of some form of the super middleweight title.

"I always thought I was faster and better than Jeff Lacy,'' Calzaghe said after the judges' cards had made that clear by the fact none of them had calzaghe losing so much as a single round. "I figured I had the speed. With a guy as strong as Lacy you need to throw fast combinations. Get in and out. That's what I did. Boxing is the art of hit and not get hit."

"I showed everybody I'm up there with the best fighters in the world. I should be ranked in the top 10 pound for pound somewhere.''

Considering how dominant Calzaghe was against Lacy that would seem assured. Although Lacy seemed to catch Calzaghe solidly once or twice, never did the man who first won the WBO title in 1997 from Chris Eubank seem unsettled. His domination seemed to grow with each passing round until he all but destroyed poor Lacy in the seventh round. After pinning him on the ropes, Calzaghe drilled him with an uppercut that lifted Lacy's head and then battered his face with several fast combinations that left Lacy streaming blood from both eyes and his nose.

When the round was over Lacy stared at his opponent, a look of stunned disbelief on his face before he slowly trudged back to his corner. There trainer Dan Birmingham tried to impress on Lacy the urgency of the moment and the fact that he was neither using his jab to set up his hook nor punching in combinations. Most of the time, in fact, Calzaghe would either tie Lacy up on the inside or catch him with rapid-fire combinations that pelted Lacy's face like the hard Welsh rains that have made the land of Calzaghe's birth such a unforgiving place.

Saturday night a son of a Welsh mining town made the MEN Arena just such a hard place for Jeff Lacy. He did not just beat him, he tormented him, taunting Lacy at one point in the ninth round by winding up his left arm while pot-shotting him with his right hand. Lacy had been so thoroughly taken apart by then he could not even be offended. All he could do was continue to walk forward into another fusillade of punches, his face bearing the cuts and angry welts that made obvious there was no comeback from the beating he was taking. There was only a resolute acceptance of what had to be endured.

Late in the fight Lacy's long-time advisor, Jim Wilkes, got up from his front row seat and seemed ready to walk out, a man no longer able to watch what was happening to his young friend. In the end he was coaxed back into his seat by Lacy's promoter, Gary Shaw, but matters only got worse for his fighter. The uppercut continued to hurt Lacy badly, catching him time and again as he tried to advance, and Calzaghe's surprisingly far superior handspeed dictated the terms of engagement until Lacy finally went down for the first time in his career in the final round as much from exhaustion and the accumulation of punishment he'd taken than from any one bruising Calzaghe blow.

He got up but to no good end, finishing the night barely holding on with both eyes bleeding and his lips turning crimson as they became stained with his own leaking plasma, which was flowing in a small stream no one could dam from his nose. When the final bell sounded, Lacy walked slowly back to the safety of his cornermen's arms, slumping onto his stool with no need to hear the judges' final rendering. There was no sense of mystery about what was to come, no reason to debate the inevitable. It was obvious what had happened - a guy Jeff Lacy thought was just some Ordinary Joe turned out to be much more than that.

"I came here thinking I'd knock him out,'' Lacy admitted. "I didn't think he could handle my pressure. He showed he could. His inside game was superb. I need to work on my boxing skills more.'' 

That could not be said of Joe Calzaghe. His boxing skills were as he said they were. They were commanding and, in the end, so was he.