Roy Jones Believes Bernard Hopkins "Still Got It" At 50

By Keith Idec

NEW YORK – Roy Jones Jr. thought Sergey Kovalev would beat Bernard Hopkins, but boxing’s former pound-for-pound king doesn’t think his rival is finished, despite that Hopkins turned 50 on Thursday.

“Bernard can go wherever he wants to go because he’s still got it,” Jones said. “It’s just that here’s the difference – in our country guys are really not being taught from the ground up as well as they used to be. Over there, these guys learn to box from the ground up, from 8, 9, 10 years old, the whole bunch of them.

“Over here, only a select few are being taught like that. When me and Hopkins came up, everybody was being taught like that. But now it’s not like that. That’s why Hopkins can fight at 50 and I can fight at 46, because we know more than most of the guys from this country. But when you meet a guy from another country, that’s as well-schooled as you are, and he’s younger, youth does play a big role. And that’s kind of what happened in [the Kovalev-Hopkins] fight.”

Jones (59-8, 42 KOs), who’s 1-1 against Hopkins, expects the legendary light heavyweight from Philadelphia to bounce back from his one-sided defeat to Kovalev (26-0-1, 23 KOs) on Nov. 8 in Atlantic City and out-box a top light heavyweight who’s much younger than him. Jones, who’ll turn 46 on Friday, also anticipates that he’ll win noteworthy fights before retiring, too.

“I expect us to go on and beat high-level guys,” said Jones, who has won five straight fights after losing three in a row from 2009-2011. “Not just him – us.”

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.