The war of words between British heavyweights has escalated along familiar lightweight lines before they meet in Manchester
British boxing is blessed for blarney and belts at the moment. Not only are there three British fighters in two world heavyweight title fights over the next seven weeks (reflecting the chaos that attends the sport) but two of them, David Haye and Audley Harrison, would not look out of place trading insults across the Dispatch Box in the House of Commons.
The third, Dereck "Delboy" Chisora, who fights the two-belt champion Wladimir Klitschko in December, also has a tongue and wit made for ticket-selling and gave the Ukrainian the benefit of his north London street education earlier in the week. The stiff, decent champion proved an ordinary foil.
It is the feud between Haye and Harrison that carries more venom and it picked up pace appreciably today. First, Harrison ? summonsed by Haye from his California training camp on Tuesday to hype their WBA title fight in Manchester on 13 November ? unleashed a surreal blast at his one-time friend.
"He's just like I was," the 39-year-old Harrison said of the 30-year-old Haye. "I also was young and brash. His ego's out of control. Part of the beast that is David Haye, I created it. He idolised me. I'm coming back to destroy a part of each other I left behind years ago."
Haye, amused by the Frankenstein parallel, responded as coolly as he could in a gym artificially heated to 27 degrees to resemble the light-glare furnace of the ring they will share three Saturdays from now.
"I do have an ego," Haye said, "but it's not out of control. Look, he can try to be as philosophical as he wants. He can try to say he created me. He didn't create me. He says he was an idol of mine. He wasn't. Who cares? I'm going to get in the ring and I'm going to knock him out.
"He's in fantasy land. That's his problem. He looks too much into things. I've heard him talk about opponents in the past, breaking them down fraction by fraction. He has to have a strategy, write everything down, with plan A, plan B, plan C. When it comes to it, he just gets beat. He's too busy thinking what he actually wants to do.
"I'm a natural-born fighter. I don't care who it is; I get in the ring and fight them. Boxing is instinctive. Audley's a very intelligent man. Before big fights he's tipped a fighter to win a certain way, I'd disagree ? and he would be right. So he knows boxing. But that all-knowing eye that he has got, no question, he doesn't shine it on himself."
If boxing were reduced to a contest of self-knowledge, Haye might be right in assuming he has established an early lead over Harrison, a complicated and intense individual burdened by unfulfilled ambition since winning the Olympic super-heavyweight gold medal in Sydney in 2000 yet, because of the demands of the business, needing to reinvent himself after each of his four defeats.
"I always aspired to be Olympic champion," Haye said. "I never achieved that and he did. He's still got that ego but it's based on something he did 10 years ago. He was a similar age to what I am now. He was in his prime. He didn't move forward as a professional, even when he was fighting bums on the BBC."
Neither has been able to pinpoint the exact starting point of their falling-out; it hardly matters, as there is now more serious business to attend to.
Soon the talking will stop. For one of them the silence will linger painfully and long into retirement.
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