Good Summation Of Jc/bh Fight And The Ensuing Hopkins Denial.

DENY, DENY, DENY (April 21, 2008)
By William Dettloff
Following his loss to Joe Calzaghe , Bernard Hopkins, who is nothing if not a kind of politician, tried to use his considerable powers of persuasion to convince everyone that they had seen something they clearly had not.
"I wanted him to run into my shots," Hopkins said. "I think I made him do that, and I think I made it look pretty easy. I think I controlled the pace, and I controlled the fight."
Politicians do this sort of thing all the time.
What most of us saw was a competitive, close fight (from my recliner I scored it 115-114 for Calzaghe) that Hopkins controlled early, but whose tempo and choreography came under Calzaghe’s control about midway through and only in the briefest moments thereafter swayed back the other way.
One such moment came in the 10th round after Hopkins, obviously stalling either to slow Calzaghe’s burgeoning momentum or to gain a respite for his 43-year-old lungs, feigned real injury after what appeared to be a harmless cuff to his "privates" (or "junk" to those of you under 30 years old and in need of translation).
Whatever the motivation, the delay energized Hopkins sufficiently to get his hands moving, and for the first time in several rounds he was able to bang off a couple of combinations. But even that demonstrated that Calzaghe had succeeded in getting Hopkins to fight in the way that he wanted.
Calzaghe is especially good at drawing opponents into the kind of small-arms firefight that favors the Welshman’s odd, aesthetically displeasing but irrefutably effective style. His unusual combination of blazing hand speed, stout jaw, superb stamina, and southpaw stance conspire to render irrelevant (and then some) his amateurish propensity for slinging arm punches.
That at his age Hopkins was able to floor Calzaghe, as he did in the opening round, and to control the early rounds too is testament to his remaining, if dwindling, presence in the ring, where, in the end, politicking can take you only so far.
That so much late money came in on Hopkins, knocking the odds from 4-1 down to 2-1 by fight time is evidence of his ability to sway the minds of even the fight-betting crowd. You could say a lot of that was bet with the heart, but Hopkins has never been the kind of fighter (or the kind of personality) that engenders that kind of affection.
Those who came over to Hopkins’ side in the final days—even those who had favored Calzaghe all along—did so at the strength of his conviction and of the memory of having been proved wrong by him in the past.
As occurs to all politicians eventually, Hopkins let slip what he really thought when he said that he did what he wanted to for "half" the fight, and that he knew he had nothing of which to be ashamed.
It happens to the best of them. And he was right on both counts.