Haye - Say's I talked the talk, but I didn't walk the walk!!

[armin]

Listening to thet way he speaks on it I don't think he believes he can actually beat him. He banked self entirely on a ko punch with zero else to fall back on, like I said before the fight he looks "shook", un nerved. Almost sounds like he's very real about that Oct. retirement and just wants to cash out big?!

He definitely believes he can beat him. Haye has complete arrogance & self-confidence. He probably still can't quite work out how it's happened. Every other loss in his amateur & pro career could be rationalized away in his own mind, other than a toe, he's got nothing for this one to get away from the fact he was in with a better boxer.

Thats it though,aside from relying on a sharp tongue and a potent punch he's really set himself up for the downfall. Your right yeh, he really does come off as having no rationalization. His arrogance undermines self confidence...I just don't know if a guy can have both really.

Most successful boxers don't rationalize defeat though. You need that self-confidence & touch of arrogance to compete. Just a few weeks ago one of my team-mates seriously said that he thinks he could beat George Groves. This is a guy with just under 20 fights as an amateur.

Haye may have set himself up for a downfall, but he genuinely believed that he could win this fight or he wouldn't have said all of it. I'll say that I found his performance far less offensive than Hatton's against Pacquiao, which consisted of abandoning all he'd learnt since the age of 12 to charge around like a pub drunk.

I will say one thing, I think it's extremely unfair to expect fighters to say anything rational or clear immediately after a fight. They've just been getting hit, so of course they're going to be a bit all over the place. I know that if someone shoved a camera & microphone into my face after 3 rounds of an am fight, they'd probably get all sorts of incoherent bollocks.

Yeah I posted about this earlier. Pschologically speaking Haye, like many elite sportsmen is character disordered (as opposed to neurotic) meaning that for any failures he automatically looks outside of himself to external factors to blame. In terms of learning, and competition it's actually a very helpful trait to have, as losing and failing at anything in life is painful, and it's even more so if you think it's due to you own inadequacies. Haye's natural mindset is to look for outside factors to blame for his failures which actually protects his mind and self belief. I have no doubt that he genuinely believed his toe was the reason he lost, and it's probably better for him, should he come back that he continues to believe that as he will still have that self confidence that at his best he can beat anyone.

His mindset is one of the reasons he has got so far though, he's had setbacks, a couple of embarrassing past knockouts but he's not been beaten by them because he was able to rationalise them away.

Conversly I bet guys like Audley Harrison, Naseem Hamed, Zab Judah etc despite their bluster are more neurotic and badly affected by previous losses, believing it to be an internal weakness which is why they never took risks in fights after their losses, or in the case of Hamed simply never fought again.

Does this blaming outside factors tho not hinder your abbility to improve, since you don't need to imrove in your own mind since it wasn't you yourself that failed.