By Keith Idec

Joe Smith Jr.’s first-round stoppage of Andrzej Fonfara is the sole reason Smith became a viable opponent for 51-year-old Bernard Hopkins’ HBO farewell fight.

That didn’t stop Hopkins (55-7-2, 32 KOs, 2 NC) from questioning that victory and Smith’s readiness for the stage they’ll occupy Saturday night in Inglewood, California. The former undisputed light heavyweight and middleweight champion essentially deemed Smith (22-1, 18 KOs) a one-hit wonder, despite Smith’s power and youth advantages in their 12-round fight at The Forum (HBO; 10 p.m. ET/PT).

“You crack one guy – I don’t even know the guy you’re making a big deal about, whether he can fight or not,” Hopkins said about Fonfara during a press conference Wednesday. “Figarella, Fagarella. It sound like a taco. I don’t know. Who is it? They make it like he knocked out Sergey Kovalev. Or knocked out Andre Ward. I’m not underestimating him. Power is power. Don’t get me wrong – power is power. You knocked out 25 tomato cans, somehow all them 25 tomato cans went over. So I respect that. I’ve been in the game too long to [not] respect whether a guy can hit or not."

“But are we just talking about power here? Or are we talking about Matrix? Are we talking about reducing that? Once that’s gone, and once that’s not working, I heard no one say over the weekends, ‘What else he got?’ So you coming to a gun fight, and I got an Uzi, and you got a .22, with one bullet."

"So guess what? Listen, you can have those odds, Joe. If you want those odds, give me the uzi. I want a hundred shots at you. I want 20,000 things to do, against that one thing that you’re looking for – the George Foreman punch.”

The 27-year-old Smith legitimized himself by overwhelming Poland’s Fonfara in the first round of their televised fight June 18 in Chicago. Fonfara, despite Hopkins’ dismissive take on his career, had stopped Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (50-2-1, 32 KOs, 1 NC) in the ninth round and beaten former WBO and current WBA world light heavyweight champion Nathan Cleverly (30-3, 16 KOs) by unanimous decision in his two bouts before Smith knocked him out.

Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.