by Thomas Gerbasi
Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, practically any big star in the NBA, NFL, NFL, or Major League Baseball today. What they all have in common is athletic brilliance, star power, money, fame…and a lot to lose.
As we’ve seen with Woods, the greatest golfer of this era, in recent months, an indiscretion or two – or a dozen – can cost you a lot when you’re trying to project a certain image while protecting your sizeable bank account. And when it’s all said and done, while sports fans are among the most forgiving people on the planet, there will always be that stain, that asterisk, on his bio sheet.
Which is fine, nobody’s perfect. But it’s a different asterisk than the ones next to the names of people like Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Bill Russell, or Curt Flood, all athletes who stood for something, who made statements that may not have been popular at the time, and who were socially aware and fearless when talking about the issues of the day. That’s something the Tiger Woodses and Michael Jordans can’t claim. Sure, they’ve made their money and built their brands, but when the last hole is played and the last shot is taken, what will their legacies off the course and court be?
And you can paint the majority of the professional sports world with that brush these days, where tweeting comes before talk of health care reform, and education gets pushed aside for the afterparty.
Then there’s Bernard Hopkins. You may not want to watch him fight for 12 rounds, and you can either love him or hate him, but what you have to do is realize that in this modern era, no boxer has taken a spotlight to the sport, warts and all, quite like he has. He has testified before a New York City task force about boxing reform, and before Congress to discuss the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act. That’s not to mention the countless inflammatory statements he made and lawsuits and disputes he has been involved with in his quest for equality in the sport.
Needless to say, he’s come a long way from the day he walked out of Graterford State Penitentiary in 1988 after serving 56 months and was told by the warden, “you’ll be back.”
The normally loquacious Hopkins, in probably the shortest statement he’s ever made, simply replied, “No, I won’t.”
And he hasn’t. He’s walked the straight line since then, becoming one of the greatest middleweights of all-time. But history in the ring wasn’t enough for the man dubbed ‘The Executioner.’
“I wanted to be the Bill Russell of my time, I wanted to be the Muhammad Ali, the Jim Brown, the Satchel Paige,” Hopkins told BoxingScene. “I wanted to be something other than a fighter who won a championship, who made some money. I wanted to be a guy known in history because history was something that was really interesting to me. To see guys like Martin Luther King get spit on and get called all kinds of names and still say that he’s gonna be peaceful, I couldn’t do that. They would have killed me years ago. I was born in ’65. If it was 1918, I’m telling you, I’d be dead. That took great will, that took great patience. Look at the history of Ghandi – he went to jail, he fasted, didn’t eat because he wanted to make a statement. Now I like to eat. I woulda sold out in two days if I couldn’t eat. So everybody’s strength is different. And I don’t say this to joke, but you have to be a little bit crazy to do things that’s not really the best thing to do diplomatically.”
Hopkins has been accused of many things over the years, but ‘diplomatic’ has never been placed next to his name. He recalls the 2001 press conference in Puerto Rico before perhaps his greatest bout against Felix Trinidad, where he took the flag of Trinidad’s homeland and tossed it to the ground in a fit of anger. The stadium where the press conference was being held erupted, with fans chasing Hopkins out of the place.
“When I was in Puerto Rico, right now I look at it like ‘damn, why did I do that? I could have got killed over there,’” he smiles, perhaps mellowing at the age of 45. “But that’s the like the Monday Morning Quarterback thing. But right then and there, I needed to make some kind of statement to let people understand how serious I was and they weren’t listening. Now they listen, and that’s the type of guy I’ve been. When I was younger, that got me in a whole lot of trouble. I had that same mentality even when I didn’t know I had it.”
And before the 20 title defenses, and the mega-fights and mega-paydays, Hopkins was just another fighter. He was a hard-nosed competitor with an alphabet belt and the type of old-school style that made him an unattractive prospect for the ‘big’ names of the sport. Hopkins was a hard hat and lunch pail fighter, and it was that demographic outside the ring that gravitated to him. In return, Hopkins fought for the blue-collar workers of the fight game, the ones who would never see a million dollar payday. It was an uphill climb to say the least. As he puts it, “I’m walking into disaster from Day One that I became a prize fighter.”
He’s right. The old fight game adage is that in boxing, five percent of the fighters make 95 percent of the money. The rest fight over that five percent. Of course Hopkins is in that highest fistic tax bracket and has been for years, but when he was making the most noise is when he really couldn’t afford to anger the powers that be in the sport. But he did it anyway.
“With me, it was like ‘Bernard, don’t go to the senate hearings in New York City and talk about how we can make the Ali bill come to pass. It’s not in your best interests Bernard,’” he recalls. “I got so many calls. And I’m the IBF champion, I’ve got one or two defenses. I’m like a little bird in the forest. It’s not like I had a lot of power and I definitely didn’t have a million dollar payday in my whole life at that time, and I went down there and did it anyway.”
So the million dollar question is, ‘why?’
“The perception of our sport in corporate America, I don’t even have to tell you, is that the fighters, 90 percent of them, are exploited and taken advantage of by the people who have the higher education,” he said. “It always amazes me that boxing is one of the only sports that I know that have got more people making money off of fighters than fighters themselves. Unbelievable.”
But who’s talking about that and making enough noise that the culture and business model in the sport can make the changes it needs to?
…
I’m still waiting…
Exactly. No one but Hopkins. And even though some would say that the Philadelphia native has become part of the industry he railed against years ago thanks to his superstar status and ownership stake in Golden Boy Promotions, he still has that fire to see and implement change and to discuss the issues that high-profile pro athletes deem as too hot for their image. Why haven’t more modern athletes followed suit?
“Because they are comfortable in this world and they made things that have been offered to them become their God,” he said. “They lost religion, they lost respect for themselves, and they don’t want to forfeit the perks that come with being part of the good ol’ boy network.”
Then again, Hopkins does understand that not everyone can make that decision to go against the grain, especially these days when one wrong move can crucify you in the tabloids.
“It doesn’t make these people less of a man or less of a woman because they don’t speak up,” he agrees, but it does make you appreciate when someone does stand up and say what’s on their mind without a PR firm holding the strings and feeding them lines. Does that mean that Hopkins will go off on tangents that can sometimes be bizarre or off-color? Absolutely. But when you look past the bluster, you will see that Hopkins does know what he’s talking about, and when it comes down to it, he does admit some disappointment that others haven’t followed his lead.
“You know what’s really disappointed me is not when the person don’t know and don’t do it, because you can’t do something you don’t have knowledge of, but people who are in a position where they don’t need no more money or no more fame, whether they’re at the end of their career or out of their career, and they don’t do nothing,” he said. “What can these people do to you now? I can understand to a degree, that okay, you wanted to be a millionaire; you wanted to have the luxuries of this life. Hey, anybody with any sense will want to live and take care of their family and not have to worry about nothing. But after a time, even if you’ve played the game, what can these people do to you? So it’s always surprising to me that I will see – without getting into any names – people who have well over 50 million dollars, well over 10 million dollars, who can actually say, you know what, at the end of the day I want to help other fighters that won’t be blessed to be in my position or Oscar De La Hoya’s position, Shane Mosley’s position or Floyd Mayweather’s position, or even Roy Jones’ position. There comes a time where you’ll be saying this is what it is, let’s try to make it better for the future of boxing, the athletes, and the credibility of boxing 10, 15, 20 years from now, when nobody’s gonna be thinking about us anymore as far as in the boxing world. History to me is not only what I’ve done, and Bill Russell and other athletes have done in spite of risking their political standing. It’s making people respect what we’re governed by, which is freedom of opinion, even if it may be detrimental to your career, and in some cases if you catch one of those nuts out there, your life.”
In a little over a week, Bernard Hopkins will step into the ring for the 58th time as a professional to meet Roy Jones Jr. in Las Vegas. It’s a fight he’s waited for since he lost to Jones in 1993, and one he is expected to win. If he does, it will be another notch in his cap, another big name victim on his resume. But regardless of the outcome, Hopkins’ legacy is already secure, in and out of the ring.
“I had to always go into the ring knowing I had to win based on the stance - and some would say the big mouth - that I have,” he said. “That’s part of my legacy, and that’s tied in that I took on the industry. I went against the grain. People can say – supportive or not supportive – before the Golden Boy relationship, and even still now in some situations, that Bernard Hopkins, for wrong or right, took on a giant of an industry and was willing to be squashed like a bug by the powers that be, but he was willing to take that risk. And I went into the ring fighting like that. And I may not have that a hundred percent like I used to, but it’s still there. As long as I’m gonna be an active fighter, I really personally need that. If I don’t have that, then you might as well just kiss my butt goodbye because that’s been one of my biggest incentives – to do what I do knowing that behind me somebody wants to throw dirt on me.”
Part One – The Executioner in Winter
https://www.boxingscene.com/?m=show&id=26146
