It was 5am in the morning in Manchester in 2006 and three men sat intoxicated, not with alcohol but the honeyed taste of satisfaction.

Joe Calzaghe, dad Enzo and promoter Frank Warren had waited for a moment like this. Joe had just given one of the finest exhibitions of boxing ever seen in a British ring as he pummelled Jeff Lacy for 12 painful rounds.

Lacy came an unbeaten IBF super-middleweight champion and acclaimed as "the new Tyson" but left a broken man who would never be the same again.

How his cornermen allowed Lacy to go through the last three rounds of slaughter I'll never know.

Calzaghe had proven once and for all that he was one of the very best British boxing has produced since the war and he compounded that belief with further victories over Mikkel Kessler and Bernard Hopkins.

The win over Roy Jones was a little hollow for my liking as the great American was years beyond his glorious pound for pound best.

Now as he approaches his 37th birthday and with an unbeaten record 46 fights Calzaghe is pondering retirement and the only sour note has been the fall-out with promoter Warren who guided him with precision.

Calzaghe may have little time for Warren now but he shouldn't look back in anger as after all together they built a story - recorded on his new DVD - which will never be forgotten.

Calzaghe says that he wanted the mega fights against the likes of Hopkins and Jones much earlier in his career but was held back.

"I never thought I got the respect I deserved. I wasn't getting the opportunity for the big fights, that wasn't my problem, that was managers and promoters who control boxing," said Calzaghe.

"Since '97 (after beating Chris Eubank for the WBO title) I was looking for a unification fight. I fought six former world champions because it cost less to pay them. I always had this frustration in me, I was wanting to prove myself so when the Lacy fight came along I was 34-35 and it rejuvenated me.

"What I gained from that I thought I lost with the Peter Manfredo fight. That was a joke fight. After that I decided I would be taking control and the only fight I wanted was Kessler, I didn't want no manager or politics getting in the way.

"I wanted to fight against the best ? after 11 years now I've achieved all I wanted to achieve and I have to decide do I want to keep doing it, I'll be 37. My contract came to and end (with War

ren) and I went my own way."

Warren naturally feels aggrieved and they are currently in the middle of a legal battle over the Hopkins fight in Las Vegas.

Warren refutes any suggestion that he wasn't keen on placing Calzaghe in with the best of his contemporaries at the end of the 1990s and particularly the early part of this century.

"At the time the other champions were in Germany, Markus Beyer and Sven Otkke and they weren't coming out of there as their records show and Jones was a light-heavyweight. I made big offers to both the Germans and they wouldn't do a deal," said Warren.

"And Joe knows all about Hopkins. We had a deal agreed and then he came back asked for the double the money.

"Joe grossed £17m with me so I don't think that's too bad. Now he says the game is dying and yet he's taken out a promoter's licence, what's the point in that?"

In regard to multi-weight champion Jones, Calzaghe admits that he would "have loved to have fought him five years ago" as the win would have meant so much more even though his performance could not be faulted.

"Jones always had handspeed but he would never throw the amount of punches that I threw. It would have been a harder fight but I would have fancied my chances," he added.

Now he must make the biggest decision of his life and after so many fine triumphs he has nothing more to prove.

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