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When champions make their exit from the game the last fight is often a sad one. Bernard Hopkins, however, intends to go out in the proverbial blaze of glory when he challenges Antonio Tarver for the light-heavyweight championship.
If Hopkins wins it will be one of the great performances of modern times, a 41-year-old former middleweight champion going up in weight to take on the world’s leading fighter at 175 pounds.
Hopkins’s greatest wins were against fighters moving up in weight — Felix “Tito” Trinidad and Oscar De La Hoya. Now it is he who is facing a naturally bigger fighter.
Hopkins could, as he has said, have left the sport with an easy, “going away” type of fight after losing his second close and debatable decision to Jermain Taylor last December. Instead he is saying his farewell in a fight that most people think he will lose. Most, but not all. Perhaps swayed a little by the power of Hopkins’s personality and the conviction of his pre-fight utterances, there are those who believe he can pull off the upset.
It is significant that Hopkins elected to train in New Orleans to prepare under the fitness legend Mackie Shilstone.
It was Shilstone who supervised the diet and conditioning of light-heavyweight champions Michael Spinks and Roy Jones Jr. when they added muscle and went up to heavyweight to defeat Larry Holmes and John Ruiz respectively. As Hopkins points out, Shilstone’s services do not come cheaply. The fact that the frugal Hopkins is willing to spend a significant amount of money to get himself bigger and stronger is seen as compelling evidence that he is serious about this fight.
Tarver, too, is serious. The 37-year-old champion has a strong sense of his place in boxing history. It would be devastating for Tarver to lose to a middleweight who is considered ancient by normal boxing standards.
There is irony involved in the PPV event. When Tarver lost narrowly to Roy Jones Jr., then knocked Jones out in the rematch, he was meeting a champion who, in the majority opinion, had taken a lot out of himself by going up to 193 pounds to meet Ruiz and then coming right down to 175 pounds again. Now Tarver is in the much the same position as Jones was in, having bulked up to a weight well in excess of 200 pounds to play the part of fictional heavyweight champion Mason Dixon in the latest Rocky movie.
When I spoke with Tarver’s trainer, Buddy McGirt, more than a month ago he assured me that the champion’s weight was on target although of course it has, as always, been hard work to shed the surplus.
When Tarver appeared on Wednesday Night Fights this week he looked good, although, as he was wearing a suit, one had to assume that the body underneath was toned — but analyst Teddy Atlas commented on the champion’s apparent sheen of fitness.
Hopkins, meanwhile, has looked significantly bigger in the upper body in the weeks leading up to the big fight and as always he exudes confidence.
In a way Hopkins is in an extremely favourable position. If he loses in a dignified way, no harm will be done to his reputation because he is the underdog.
All the pressure is on Tarver. If he loses to Hopkins, history’s verdict is likely to be damning. People will say that he beat a Roy Jones who was past his best — and might add that Tarver was not all that good anyway. Tarver will not wish to put himself in a position where he has to live with such cruel assessments. I think he will come into this fight in a mood of total concentration and the type of mindset in which defeat is simply unthinkable.
Tarver has not taken Hopkins lightly. Buddy McGirt told me they have prepared for the best possible Bernard Hopkins. Although Tarver has promised to knock out Hopkins — the supposed $250,000 side bet says he will do it inside five rounds — McGirt told me that the focus will be strictly on getting the win, and if the knockout comes, it comes.
Hopkins, as ever, has scored more points in the pre-fight verbal exchanges, alluding to Tarver as a “one-hit wonder” based on the single-shot knockout over Jones in their rematch. He seems to have succeeded in irritating Tarver, but this might not help him much in the fight itself because Tarver seems able to channel any anger he may be feeling into a controlled type of aggression.
And I think control is important for Tarver in this fight. I think he should try to keep the pressure on Hopkins and endeavour to stay a step ahead but not risk tiring himself out trying for an early knockout. If Hopkins hits him with a shot or two, he must fire right back but, as I see it, he must always stay steady and disciplined. The good news for Tarver backers is that this has always been Tarver’s way and there seems no reason to think he is going to change.
Intangibles? Hopkins is almost as tall as the 6ft 2ins Tarver and I think that with his added muscular bulk he will compare favourably with the champion from the physical standpoint: he may not actually look all that much smaller when they come out to face each other. And while we think of Hopkins as an old man of the ring, his fitness-orientated lifestyle and savvy style of fighting means that he is exceptionally well preserved — and he is only four years older than Tarver.
Tarver’s southpaw style may not be all that much of a problem for Hopkins. He has beaten southpaws such as Robert Allen, Syd Vanderpool, Keith Holmes and John David Jackson — and he hired Jackson, now a well-regarded trainer, to help him with the technical aspects of the fight.
We think of the younger man as a rule coming on in the later rounds, but this may not be the case here. Tarver looked almost exhausted in the last round of his rubber match with Roy Jones last October while it was Hopkins who was stronger in the later rounds in both of his fights with the much-younger Jermain Taylor: I would not be too surprised to see Hopkins once again making a late charge against a tiring opponent.
This brings us to the biggest intangible of all: how the weight loss after playing a big-screen heavyweight will affect Tarver.
If Tarver has indeed drained himself making 175 pounds he might be in trouble against a wily campaigner such as Hopkins, who is quick to detect weakness in an opponent.
In order for Hopkins to test Tarver’s stamina, though, he has to be able to make the champion fight at a fast pace, and in the Philadelphia Executioner’s recent fights he has boxed carefully and in the manner of a boxer with self-preservation in mind.
A pattern has evolved in which Hopkins plays it safe and fights in spurts, as in his easy win over an outclassed Howard Eastman. Although he sank Oscar De La Hoya in the ninth he did not significantly raise his pace until the fight was half over. Indeed, the boxer with whom he is now a promotional partner was actually in front on one of the judges’ scorecards after eight rounds. Yes, De La Hoya is gifted and dangerous, but he was essentially a light-middleweight. Now Hopkins is meeting a big light-heavyweight. If he did not come out aggressively Oscar, can we expect him to do so against Tarver?
Hopkins is an exceptionally intelligent fighter. He knows his own body. There was a reason why he paced himself and did not really start fighting until deep into his two fights with Jermain Taylor. Yes, he wanted Taylor to burn up some energy but I think that Hopkins was also making sure that he would have plenty in reserve for the home stretch. He did not want to risk an expenditure of resources that might have left him vulnerable.
All this leads me to expect that we will see much the same sort of performance from Hopkins that we did in the two fights with Taylor. In the early rounds I think we will see Hopkins making cute moves, doing a lot of feinting, looking to get in with sharp punches — the right to the body could work well for him — but at all times being watchful and wary. In this scenario, Tarver should be able to get off to an early lead on the scorecards simply by throwing more punches than the middleweight great.
I think that Hopkins will try to keep the fight relatively close for six, seven or eight rounds, and then try to steal the decision with an increased punch output in the last third of the bout. A problem for Hopkins, though, is that Tarver hits hard with the left hand down the middle. Hopkins is a tough man but I think he might be a little shocked at the weight of the punches coming from the genuine light-heavyweight.
It is the power that Tarver brings, the threat of his punching, that might keep Hopkins contained at the very point in the fight when he should be making his move.
I do not see a great fight but I do think this will be an absorbing tactical battle with some exciting moments. I believe it is very important to Hopkins that, even if he loses, he does not get stopped. He will in a sense be a moral winner if he simply goes the full 12 rounds and makes it a somewhat competitive fight — which is what I see happening here. I look for Tarver to be more assertive, throw more punches and land the harder blows, thus keeping Hopkins in a defensive posture for most of the 12 rounds.
Tarver by unanimous decision, something like 117-111 on the scorecards, looks, to me, the likeliest outcome.
Graham Houston, *********.com
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