By Matteo Alderson
It may not be official, but it looks like Bernard Hopkins is going to fight Jermain Taylor in July. I know it’s a very attractive match up pitting the great older established champ against a young hungry undefeated former Olympian, but the question is that if Hopkins has less than three fights left in his illustrious career then why is he fighting a dangerous kid on the way up who really doesn’t have a lot of market appeal.
They are talking about Bernard getting 3 million for the fight, but at this point in his career that’s chump change. I mean the guy has had one of the longest reigns in the history of the sport, and he is the only person to have stopped De La Hoya and Trinidad. He is the MAN right now. Boxing is a funny business because It’s so politically charged. In fact, I believe that it’s the most politicized sport in the world. Unless Hopkins realizes that this fight isn’t the best thing for him at this point in his career and decides to go another route, he is going to fight Taylor because of numerous politically influenced factors. First it’s tradition at HBO to pit the old established champion against the young up and coming dynamo. They did it with the Vargas-Campas fight, the Floyd Mayweather-Genaro Hernandez match, as well as with the Lewis-Grant match. Those fights and many others have set this precedent by which HBO matches champions with fighters that they view as potential future superstars in the sport. This allows HBO to expose viewers to the sport’s future and it provides them with the opportunity to form an early relationship with the up and coming fighter so that they will most likely be the network involved with that potential future superstar.
All this stuff is obvious and HBO executives would readily acknowledge it, but there are two other major political forces that are influencing the development of the Hopkins-Taylor bout that HBO might not want to talk about. First of all it’s obvious that the most lucrative fight for Hopkin’s would be against the winner of Trinidad-Wright. Trinidad is an economic powerhouse, having been involved with the most lucrative non-heavyweight fight of all time (De La Hoya-Trinidad). In addition, Hopkins has also already knocked Trinidad out. The problem is that even though HBO regularly works with King, they hate doing it and want to keep him out of the negotiations for a number of reasons. First King would increase the amount of money that HBO would have to invest in the fight by demanding that Trinidad is handsomely compensated, which would then cause the initial investment in the fight to increase exponentially because Hopkins wouldn’t take less than Tito. Thus as Trinidad’s demands increase so would Hopkins’ demands. Hell he was reluctant to take less than Jones in their proposed 2002 encounter, and he had lost to Roy.
In this situation, Hopkins would demand purse priority because he is the champion and Tito is the one looking for revenge. So at the end of the day HBO would end up putting a huge guarantee on a fight that would be big, but maybe not have enough cross-over appeal to the point where ESPN and FOX SPORTS would be talking about it for two weeks straight. And to top matters, Hopkins and Golden Boy Promotions are currently involved in litigation with King. So basically HBO isn’t anxious to make a rematch between Hopkins and Trinidad because (1) they don’t want to have to deal with King, (2) they don’t want to have to arbitrate negotiations between Golden Boy Promotions and Don King Productions, and (3) they don’t want to have to put up the money to make the fight happen since Tito and Hopkins would demand at least 10 million a piece.
Now lets say Winky wins the fight against Trinidad. A Wright-Hopkins match is definitely a fight that can be made. At the moment Wright is more respected and better known than Taylor due to his battle with Vargas and his triumphs over Mosley, but Winky still is a thirty-something year old fighter that lacks punching power. HBO wants to transmit and invest Hopkins’s star power into someone that will help replace their dwindling stable of stars and Winky doesn’t fit into that equation because he’s also on the tail end of his career. Also, in a business sense it’s been problematic to deal with Wright because he has reneged on so many contracts. He was with Roy Jones’s company Square Ring and then he announced he had signed with Lou DiBella, and finally it looks like he ended up with King.
We’ve covered a number of reasons why Hopkins is probably going to engage in a not so lucrative match against Jermain Taylor instead of a mega-showdown with Trinidad or Wright and all of those factors have been significant in making the Hopkins-Taylor fight happen, but really the main driving force behind HBO’s desire to make a Taylor-Hopkins is one man; Lou DiBella. You see Lou DiBella, Jermain’s Taylor’s promoter is pushing for it and he has a lot of influence at HBO. Lou is a Harvard educated lawyer that started working for HBO in the early 90’s and immediately became an intricate part of their boxing programming. Lou was a hands-on type of guy and became the Executive Vice President of HBO Sports and is credited for starting the Boxing After Dark series. The thing about Lou is, even though he is a genius and a multimillionaire who happed to win the New York State Spelling Contest as a youngster, he is a really down to earth guy. He doesn’t come across as a stuck up elitist, he’s actually someone that you can sit down with and drink a beer with and as a result he is well liked in the boxing community.
Anyway, In December of 1999 Bernard Hopkins fought Antwon Echols on Fox Sports Net for 100k and Lou being a smart guy that he is, realized that Hopkins special talents were going to waste and got him on HBO in his very next fight and guided him into the Middleweight Championship Tournament where he became a superstar and finally a multi-millionaire. The thing with Hopkins is that he is the cheapest son of a bitch to ever lace on a pair of gloves. As soon as Hopkins made it big after knocking out Trinidad, he didn’t want to compensate the people that got him there. He didn’t want to compensate Lou DiBella, whose business acumen had taken Hopkins from being just one of the Middleweight title holders to being the Undisputed Champ fighting in Madison Square Garden on Pay-Per-View. Hopkins just didn’t screw DiBella, he screwed his trainer Bouie Fischer as well. You see when Hopkins got out of prison for armed robbery and after a miscalculated loss in his pro-debut, Bouie offered Hopkins a job as a mechanic in order to help Bernard surive financially during the early stages of his career. Hopkins told Bouie, “I don’t know anything about cars,” and Bouie replied, “I didn’t ask you if you knew anything about cars.” You see Fischer supported Hopkins financially and emotionally and when Hopkins finally became a superstar and started to make millions, Bouie thought that Bernard was going recompensate him for all of his hard work and his investment into Hopkins as a person. Bernard being Bernard probably thought, “Why should I pay Bouie more money, he is doing the same work he did before?” Around this time in the spring of 2002, the boxing fraternity became disenchanted with Hopkins. HBO didn’t want to work with him because even though Lou DiBella had left HBO in 2000 in order to try to make it as a promoter, a lot of the executives at the company had worked under or with DiBella and they felt as did many others that Hopkins had ungratefully betrayed Lou. Lou DiBella is an HBO guy. The people that run HBO know him, like him, and they trust him and that is the main reason why HBO wants Hopkins’s last fight to be against Jermain Taylor. You see it’s supposed to be retribution for Lou DiBella because Lou’s company wasn’t allowed to share in Hopkins good fortune after the Trinidad win so this time the Sport’s powers that be want to make it where Lou revels in the success of Hopkins misfortune as his fighter, Jermain Taylor steps over the fallen Middleweight Great and into superstardom.
TRIVIA:
Who are the only three heavyweights to have recorded 20 or more title fight wins? (Answer Below)
I like Wayne Braithwaite against Mormeck. Its has the makings of a great fight. Remember these two guys would have been Heavyweights 30 years ago.
Showtime has really put on some good matches this year. I think the networks non-pay-per-view fights have been better than HBO’s this year.
I like Toney over Ruiz, but don’t take my advice, I picked Oquendo, Rahman, and Golota against him.
Great White Hype is an awesome boxing movie and although the characters don’t have the same names, they represent their real life counterparts and everyone from Don King to WBA President Gilbert Mendoza are in the film. Check it out, it’s a cool flick.
Trivia Answer = Larry Holmes, Muhammad Ali, and Joe Louis