Joe Calzaghe didn't exactly leave us laughing, because that wasn't his way, but, nonetheless, we will miss him considerably following his decision to leave boxing.
The Welshman does have a decent sense of humour (with Enzo as a father, it could be no other way) but he was not in the light-entertainment industry. For the 25 years up to the announcement of his retirement from the ring on Thursday, he was consumed with the serious business of fighting for self-respect, recognition and, when it got down to it, a living.
It was a career mired in frustration and only redeemed by triumph in Cardiff, Las Vegas and New York towards the end of it. The experience elevated and drained his spirit, as it does all boxers. What he might have admitted to himself in quiet moments was that the pressure of winning – which he met without pause since he was a thin, young, amateur – had come to outweigh the satisfaction of excellence. And the spectre of defeat, when he was past 36, was something Joe did not want to contemplate.
A proud rather than vain man, he said often he cared little for awards or the acclamation of critics. I didn't altogether believe him because, since the day he put on gloves to avoid the attention of bullies, he was convinced he was worthy of a world championship. And, as he said upon his leaving, he had nothing left to achieve. He won those titles. He heard the applause – and, as much as it gave him joy, he had taken his fill.
It will please him, make no mistake, that such highly regarded members of the boxing fraternity as Barry McGuigan, Ricky Hatton and Nigel Benn consider him the best British fighter there has been. It might be praise hewn from a minor outbreak of media hysteria, but who would argue with those gentlemen on the subject?
For what it's worth, I think he can claim to be the best these islands have produced since the war. He stands comparison with any contemporary at or around 12 stone and it was not his doing that his peers baulked at the prospect of meeting him in their prime.
Now, into the space left by his departure steps Carl Froch, an altogether more effusive character, a fighter whose personality has been tempered by the fire of exclusion. The Nottingham WBC super-middleweight champion – like Joe, unbeaten, and, for long stretches of his career, unheralded – craved a showdown with the Welshman, but age and circumstance intervened.
The loud debate about Calzaghe's legacy has concentrated, naturally enough, on his own era, but it has ignored a tough question: could he have beaten Froch? For all his gifts, for all his dominance and the accumulation of considerable wealth, I have to say I am no more certain than any other impartial observer could be.
What I do think is indisputable is that Calzaghe left boxing at the right moment. He stretched his commitment to its limit, rounding out his work with a totemic rather than defining victory over Roy Jones Jnr at Madison Square Garden, where the fight game's soul is said to reside.
Calzaghe caught the maestro at the nadir of his boxing and, for those who have admired the American for so long, it was a spectacle tinged with sadness.
What will have concentrated Calzaghe's mind more than the passing of the years will be the first-round knockdowns he endured in his final two outings, against Bernard Hopkins and Jones. It was not that the rock-jawed Welshman doubted he would rise from the canvas, but that he was dumped there in the first place.
The snipers and haters will always doubt that Calzaghe could have lived with wonderful fighters from the years before the ones he illuminated with such distinction. It is a carping quibble best left to bloggers and pub bores.
What I do know is this: if Carl Froch does even half as well as Joe Calzaghe, he will retire a happy man.
