There's more to outspoken Haye than meets the eye

LOCKER ROOM:Perhaps he will become the first heavyweight champion of the world to take the belt on his own terms, writes TOM HUMPHRIES

YOU PUSH on. You take the slings and arrows that once you dodged with a bantam’s fleet foot and then one day you see the familiar, but still ghoulish, features of Don King looking out at you from the sports pages again, his arms wrapped around two hungry fighters and you realize you haven’t been pushing on at all. You sigh and you realise you’ve just been on the far side of the roundabout. King is 79 but his malevolence is seemingly eternal and comes around again and again.

Don King had the Jedward hairstyle going on long before Simon Cowell learned that wearing the waistband of your trousers at your nipples was just as effective a trademark as King’s electrified ’fro.

Fair enough, King’s atrocities include killing a man by shooting him in the back, stomping another man to death and campaigning for George Bush, while Cowell has done nothing worse than be mean to Sister Cheryl Cole but the meat-market aspects of The X Factor and King’s world of professional boxing draw an unfortunate parallel.

There is no suggestion that Cowell and co are ever less than fair or scrupulous in their dealings with those whose sheer desperation for fame and fortune amount to a critical loss of dignity. But the desire to subject oneself to public rejection and possible humiliation in order to get under the bright lights reflects the same weakness. And those lines of judges sitting in a row? Weirdly similar.

King was on hand in Nuremberg on Saturday night as co-promoter of the Nikolai Valuev–David Haye fight when Haye, who has the sort of manners that people in boxing label as “brash”, defeated the seven foot tall, 22-stone Valuev whose disposition is such that he won’t say boo to a goose, let alone an opponent at a promotional press conference. The fight, by all accounts, looked as if it were taking place under water between two arthritics in Michelin Man suits. When two punches were thrown in the 12th round the audience had to be revived with smelling salts.

Haye thus took a world title belt away from perhaps the only man on the planet who could wear the belt without looking silly. Though the fight was an exercise in improvised dullness and Haye won slightly controversially on a points decision,the ascent of the more than slightly boorish Millwall fan to the position of WBA titleholder is deemed to be a good thing within the sport and could yet prove to be so.

Valuev, despite having the looks, physique and disposition of Shrek’s older, bigger brother, never had Shrek’s profile or recognisability. He was indistinguishable from a long line of generally harmless mammoths from Eastern Europe, big Primo Carnera-types who have been grazing on the lower slopes of the heavyweight division for some years now.

A big mouth from the place Don King likes to call “Merry Old England” is just the ticket to get the heavyweight division rolling again in Vegas. Once there on the Strip, one assumes Haye won’t have to take care of the demeaning task of personally auditioning the ring card girls. He recently told an interviewer from The Observer that between rounds he’d “look up and see a complete and utter minger walking around the ring. It was actually a distraction . . .” He set about changing this. One giant step forward for womankind.

Haye, for all the runniness of his mouth, is an interesting character, though, and his next step will be worth watching. He could yet amount to a significant figure within boxing. He affects at least to understand and see boxing for what it is, says he will quit the sport in his 31st year (he is 29) and the manner in which he dealt with the irritant that is Frank Warren gives hope that his campaign against “mingers” won’t be all he’s remembered for.

Having unified the titles available in the cruiserweight division only to discover he had also unified the planet in terms of its indifference to the feat, Haye decided 18 months ago to try a little prospectin’ in the heavyweight gold fields. His last bout at cruiserweight was against Enzo Maccarinelli, a name with which not much conjuring has been done.

The pair met in an all-British world cruiserweight title fight in March of 2008, a bout you will undoubtedly fail to remember, though the fight game in Britain tried to talk it up as the biggest bit of fisticuffs since the days of Benn and Eubank. Haye won in the second round. Warren, who had promoted the fight in conjunction with his Sports Network, must have found himself salivating uncontrollably. Generally promoters hedge their bets on a bout. Warren went into the bout as Maccarinelli’s promoter and in the normal run of things would expect that if Haye beat Maccarinelli he would get a slice of the David Haye action next time out.

Haye shook his head vigorously. No mas. Haye announced he would rather retire than work with Warren again.

“We thank Frank for sacrificing Maccarinelli, but we’d feel immense guilt if we took any more free money from Sports Network. I have a hard enough time sleeping at night as it is.”

And that’s the best thing about Haye’s ascent. Warren was left in the dust. The arrangement on Saturday night with King turns out to be a similar one to that which had Warren involved in the Maccarinelli bout. The Don owned Valuev and therefore co-promoted. Since the Maccarinelli bout, however, Haye has been busy coming up with Hayemaker Boxing, another example (he bases the model on Oscar de La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions) of boxers empowering themselves.

Hayemaker, which he founded with his friend and trainer Adam Booth, promoted Haye’s first heavyweight bout and co-promoted the fight in Nuremberg. The company is afloat thanks to a £13 million deal with Setanta Sports, who signed on to show four of Haye’s fights and six more under his promotional banner. One hopes Haye’s American future brings good things for Setanta as well as Haye.

With America in mind, Haye has already signed a five-year agreement with Golden Boy Promotions in the US. The company operates as a sort of co-operative venture around big fights with the express objective of empowering fighters. Those who take the punches get the cash they generate. Revolutionary! And so you look again at King’s tired old face as he leers out from between the sculpted shoulders of two athletes and you think maybe the world does after all push on.

Perhaps David Haye will become the first heavyweight champion of the world to take the belt on his own terms, a man who will be able to look back with no regrets. And perhaps he might then get around to empowering women and the boxing audience by doing away with the demeaning notion of ring card girls all together. Go orn my son, go orn. Say boo to that particular goose.