Their fights make the boxer

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.

They’ve weathered innumerable phases, even the one where Joe grew a mullet and adored Whitesnake.

And now, after years in relative secret for want of a globally splashy bout, after declining an offer to appear on the popular British television show “Strictly Come Dancing” and another to model underwear, Joe Calzaghe plays Vegas on Saturday night in a splashy U.S. light-heavyweight debut opposite Bernard Hopkins.

Father and son find a gratefulness in daydreams realized slowly, the better to sustain the hunger.

Joe repeatedly says and writes of Enzo that, of course, he “loves him to bits.” He employs the term “best pal.” Averting the son-fires-father drill that has visited boxing families such as the Mayweathers, Mosleys and Joneses, the Calzaghes have long since surpassed a phase in 2000 when advisors suggested changing trainers, and Joe pondered it but deemed it misguided.

What’s more, neither has strangled the other.

“Even if we had a row yesterday,” Joe said, “I’d have to think . . . what was that about?”

“I’m very crafty,” Enzo said with a wink. “I know how to say sorry. I’m not ashamed to say sorry. I know it’s her fault. I know it’s Joe’s fault. But I say sorry.”

He’s been married to Joe’s Welsh mother, Jackie, for 38 years and, he said, “We’ve been arguing for 37. If I brought flowers, she’d think, ‘What’s wrong? Something’s going on.’ ”

They welcomed Joe in 1972, and by the early 1980s, Enzo had Joe punching at rolled-up carpet with a certain, uncommon rapidity.

As this frenzied training approach persisted, some derided it. But Enzo, an accomplished musician who had traveled England playing alongside his brother Uccio, just couldn’t see why boxers always had to play the same seven chords in the same order, boxing with the same, set-up-the-punch method, and so Joe’s most shouting asset would be hand speed.

In the quiet of Wales, residing in government housing in Pentwynmawr, they trained for years in “the mangiest little building you could possibly imagine,” as Joe puts it. No ring, just a carpeted area of the floor. Surrounding ropes upheld by broom handles. No heating. Bad toilets. No showers. Buckets to trap rain. Space insufficient enough that elbows would bang walls and bruise.

Joe would exit and “cough up all the dust I’d inhaled.”

Finally, six years ago, they moved to a better non-palace, a striking place to find the world’s longest-standing boxing champion. It’s in an industrial park, down some wooden steps the boxers routinely run, next to a rugby pitch.

The sign outside, “Newbridge Boxing Club,” is beige, hand-painted, black trim. Little piles of trash dot the weedy yard. At one point, Enzo wrestles with the mulish front door to yank it open. Indoors, Joe intermittently spits on the floor during a congenial interview in the room next to the boxing gym. In places, it’s just a few notches north of squalid. The walls do boast posters of the champ, and one of Stallone’s “Rocky,” but an Observer reporter spotted a dead mouse floating in a sink, and it’s cold and dank in there.

It’s also a blast. Enzo chats on, and his brother Sergio stops by, and they prattle in Italian and English and Italian again. Joe says, “We don’t argue as much anymore; it’s more chilled-out,” and it’s compelling to think of two men, through dogged anonymity, forging to Vegas in this kind of setting.

So after all the tetchiness and barneys, it’s probably best to picture them in the heavy dark of the British winter in February 2006, just before the landmark mauling of Lacy.

Joe had thought about withdrawing, what with his hands wailing again and more cortisone injected, and Enzo had used language that cannot appear in this family newspaper, and sarcastically suggested retirement, but also realistically stated encouragement.

Somewhere in his skull, Joe knew that Enzo knew something, so in the hushed Welsh night, Joe would go on 2 a.m. jogs, and with light scarce, Enzo would follow him in the car, shining the high beams.

And as Joe ran in the patchy snow in the dark, his trainer and father and best pal would keep the window down, and he would keep hollering, “You are fitter than you’ve ever been, Joe! You will beat this guy.”