By Steve Kim
While the contracts have not been signed, it looks like Bernard Hopkins (55-7-2, 32KOs) will be facing Joe Smith (22-1, 18KOs) in what will be his farewell fight on December 17th at the Forum in Inglewood, California.
"It looks like we have a done deal. It's not signed but we have a verbal agreement. We have a verbal agreement so they can fight each other, it's for 12 rounds at 175 (pounds), Joe Smith against Bernard. We're going to contracts now, I don't anticipate any problems," BoxingScene was told by Eric Gomez, the president of Golden Boy Promotions, who has been working with Star Boxing to consummate this match-up.
Gomez insists that for the 51-year old Hopkins,"It's his final fight, his retirement fight."
Smith burst onto the scene by stopping the heavily favored Andrzej Fonfara in one round back on June 18th in Chicago. Hopkins, has not fought since being out-pointed by Sergey Kovalev back in November of 2014 in Atlantic City.
This fight will now be the HBO main event as the eagerly anticipated bout between Orlando Salido and Takashi Miura is no longer taking place.
"Salido is out of the fight, he got hurt, he hurt his back a couple of days ago," explained Gomez. "I guess Sean Gibbons had him go see a doctor in Mexico City, he went and the doctor recommended that he doesn't fight. So now we have to either come up with a replacement or just come up with another fight, entirely.
Asked if the priority was to reschedule this fight, Gomez stated - "This was supposed to be a (WBC) interim title fight but it we can come up with a suitable replacement, we'll do that. We told Mr ( Akihiko) Honda that we'll look at it and do it if we can but if not, we don't know what the WBC's going to order."
So just how will the rest of his HBO broadcast be filled out?
"We're going to look at everything,"said Gomez, on Monday morning to BoxingScene.com."There's a possibility of ( Antonio) Orozco being on, there's a possibility of Joseph Diaz. We don't know yet. We've got to work with HBO and start working on it. I've got to sit down with Oscar( De La Hoya) and look at everything."
Steve Kim is the news editor for BoxingScene.com.
