While Bernard Hopkins has held court about race, redemption and Martin Luther King, Joe Calzaghe has sat quietly with his sunglasses on his head. On occasions he has blushed. It is just as well that Las Vegas is not staging a contest of oration.

Hopkins could talk Oscar Wilde into submission while Calzaghe has never really relished the hype and the hullaballoo. When the boxers went nose to nose at a media conference this week, Hopkins stood granite still. Calzaghe danced twitchily from foot to foot.

He could not have looked more self-conscious if someone had asked him to pose in his underpants - as Marks & Spencer did, for a money-spinning endorsement. “I don't want pictures of me just wearing pants plastered all over the place,” he said.

Such things should not matter, and nor do they in most sports, but this is boxing, where bouts need selling. And for tonight's contest, for which thousands of spaces remain in the Thomas & Mack Centre, they will be peddling tickets right up until the first bell.

Far from trying to conquer the United States, Calzaghe has looked more like a man intent on a hit and run; beating Hopkins and then dashing back to the familiarity of his gym in Newbridge, Monmouthshire. The Welshman does not lack the looks, charm or intelligence to hold his own in the public arena. It is that he prefers to make a truism of the cliché that his fists do the talking.

Perhaps his bashfulness is a legacy of the bullying he suffered in his school days, something he kept from his parents. Even when they found out and offered him the chance to move schools, he insisted on staying to face down his tormentors.

Perhaps it has something to do with having such an extrovert father. At the face-to-face press conference this week, it was Enzo Calzaghe who walked along the stage to present Hopkins with a walking stick, a premeditated insult to a 43-year-old. Calzaghe Jr talked about “making a grown man cry”, but he is too regular a guy, too understated to sound truly intimidatory.

“I don't think it is in his nature to court attention,” Frank Warren, the promoter, said and, in the circumstances, it is hard to see what Calzaghe hopes to gain from signing up with Paul Stretford, the agent to Wayne Rooney. “Commercial deals,” Calzaghe claimed this week, but he has already written an autobiography and he is not about to head to Hollywood. His stated ambitions are to beat Hopkins, increase his fortune with another one or two bouts (against Roy Jones Jr?) and then retire, perhaps to set up a Calzaghe training school with his father, with an unbeaten professional record.

He has not lost since 1990, beaten on points by Adrian Opreda, a Romanian amateur, at the European Junior Championships. Calzaghe cried like a baby in the dressing-room, but when Hopkins allowed him to get a word in edgeways this week, he was confident that he would not be tasting defeat for the first time as a professional. “I am younger, fitter, I'm the better boxer,” he said. “What's to worry about?”

He admitted that he might have been uncomfortable on foreign soil a few years ago but insisted that he is sufficiently mature and experienced to handle whatever is thrown at him tonight. In any case, the crowd should not be too hostile, given that there will be thousands of supporters from Britain, including Tom Jones, who will belt out Land of My Fathers shortly before The Star Spangled Banner is, one worries, drowned out by ignorant jeers.

It is a bout that has suffered in comparison with Ricky Hatton's clash with Floyd Mayweather Jr last year. A spoiler by nature, Hopkins is no Mayweather, while Hatton, unlike Calzaghe, made a sustained effort to build an American audience. Reports yesterday suggested that the promoter, Golden Boy, had returned £1million to Planet Hollywood, the hosts of the bout, to compensate for disappointing sales. And yet it promises to be a more evenly matched struggle than Mayweather's destruction of Hatton.

When the bell rings, the challenge for Calzaghe is a simple one - to prove as eloquent with his fist as Hopkins has been with his loquacious tongue.

The US, so far, is underwhelmed. To win in the ring, with those rat-a-tat fists, is the only way Calzaghe knows to state his case.

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