By Keith Idec
While appreciative of the potentially career-changing opportunity Sergey Kovalev will receive Nov. 8, Kovalev’s manager claims Bernard Hopkins doesn’t deserve too much credit for facing his fighter.
Egis Klimas maintains Hopkins simply felt as though he had no other alternative nearly three months ago than to embrace a difficult fight the 49-year-old legend will enter as about a 2-1 underdog. Promoters needed only approximately 30 hours to negotiate terms for the Hopkins-Kovalev clash largely because Hopkins (55-6-2, 32 KOs, 2 NC) faced an IBF deadline that would’ve forced him to make a mundane mandatory defense of his IBF 175-pound crown against France’s Nadjib Mohammedi (35-3, 21 KOs) had he not agreed to a unification fight against Kovalev (25-0-1, 23 KOs).
“He had no choice,” Klimas said. “He can promote and he can talk [about] whatever he wants. He just put himself in a position where he had no choice. He had to do a mandatory against a guy who nobody knew, that no TV network wanted. Showtime turned him down with the [Adonis] Stevenson [unification] fight. What else was left for him? And he had one day to sign that contract, so they extended the IBF mandatory [deadline] to the end. So what choice did he have? He had no choice.”
Nevertheless, Philadelphia’s Hopkins and Russia’s Kovalev are scheduled to square off in a highly anticipated 12-round fight for Hopkins’ IBF and WBA light heavyweight titles and Kovalev’s WBO 175-pound championship at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City. HBO will televise their fight after a scheduled 10-round welterweight bout between 2008 American Olympian Sadam Ali (20-0, 12 KOs), of Brooklyn, and Argentina’s Carlos Abregu (36-1, 29 KOs).
Keith Idec covers boxing for The Record and Herald News, of Woodland Park, N.J., and BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.
