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by graham houston

That was easy, wasn’t it?

The underdog in the betting, Bernard Hopkins made Antonio Tarver look like a novice. Twelve rounds of “I hit you, you don’t hit me.”

I have to give Hopkins all the credit in the world not only for a wonderful display of ring craftsmanship but for the hard work and discipline he showed in building himself up into a muscular, fast and strong light-heavyweight.

As Emanuel Steward remarked in the PPV commentary, Hopkins probably should have
been fighting at this weight years ago: he looked a tremendous physical specimen at 174 pounds. I think we now know why he paced himself so carefully in his middleweight title bouts of late. I believe he knew that at 160 pounds he had to husband his resources. Against Tarver, Hopkins looked a different fighter to the one who fought in spurts against Howard Eastman and twice waited until the later rounds before starting to fight in earnest against Jermain Taylor.

Hopkins looked ageless at 41. He says he will stick to his promise to retire. If this was in fact his last fight, he did indeed, just as he said he would, save the best for last.

Everyone seems in agreement that Hopkins, after such a one-sided win over the universally recognised No. 1 light-heavyweight, cemented his status as an all-time great.

I would pay Hopkins what I think is the ultimate compliment, which is that he could have fought at the highest level in any era. That in itself makes him a great fighter.

The only thing he has not done is to have one of those classic triumphs in which he rallied from adversity to achieve victory. His greatest wins, over Felix “Tito” Trinidad, Oscar De La Hoya and now Tarver were “on top” victories in fights in which he always held the upper hand.

Of course, it is not a bad thing, to have dominated the best fighters he met
— with the obvious exception of Roy Jones Jr., a loss that came at a time when Hopkins was still relatively inexperienced.

It has been said that Hopkins's biggest wins were over fighters moving up in weight, but he closed out his career — if truly this is the end — by moving up two weight classes to outclass the champion. Quite a closing statement.

It must be said, though, that Tarver, after all his “Give me my due” demands, turned out to be a monumental letdown.

He moved forward, but in a tentative way, and was always quick to bail out when Hopkins made aggressive moves.

When Tarver beat Glen Johnson in the rematch, even when he outpointed Jones in their third fight, he had thrown punches and on the whole fought hard. In this fight he seemed fearful and frozen — Hopkins had a much tougher fight with one of his previous southpaw opponents, Syd Vanderpool.

Tarver looked inept — yes, Hopkins had something to do with that — and he looked weak, in both the mental and physical sense.

To use a Hopkins-type prison analogy, Tarver was like a scared kid on his first day inside trying to face down a hardened convict and hoping someone would rescue him.

Tarver’s whole demeanour was, in a word, deferential. He cocked his left hand
but hardly threw it and sometimes it looked as if he wanted to punch and get away at the same time.

Between rounds Tarver was blinking so furiously it was as if he’d walked through a
sandstorm. He almost seemed to be having a kind of mental collapse.

Hopkins, you could say, has this effect on opponents. (Well, a lot of them.) He
is as much a master of intimidation as Sonny Liston and Mike Tyson ever were and the greatest since Muhammad Ali at unnerving the other man with mind games.

Yes, I picked Tarver, but was I so wrong in expecting him to come out fighting — which after all is what he promised he would do?

Hopkins is tricky and artful and he can keep a man guessing, but if Tarver had marched in resolutely and let his hands go he might have had a chance of getting into the fight. Then again, maybe not, maybe Hopkins was on such a
different level that Tarver might have got chewed up no matter what he tried.

I had my first inkling of what might happen when I got a glimpse of the weigh-in footage, when Tarver turned his back and Hopkins walked around him and stood almost nose to nose as he told his opponent what was in store for him.

Tarver’s words, we now know, had been just so much bluster. Hopkins was serious. I was not sure at the time, but, looking back, I suspect that Tarver might have been beaten at that moment, at the weigh-in.

One thing we know about Hopkins is that he is very quick to scent weakness in an opponent and I believe he detected doubt in Tarver and rammed home the psychological advantage.

If the mental part of the fight had in fact been won the day before, the physical part was won in the opening round. It did not take a genius to figure out in the first three minutes that Hopkins knew he had Tarver right where he wanted
him. As a contest it was over long before Tarver staggered and touched down in the fifth.

Tarver did not use weight loss as an excuse for a truly pathetic exhibition but there were times when it looked as if he could hardly stand up, and Hopkins wasn’t exactly piling on the pressure. What he was doing was picking Tarver to pieces. At least Tarver, no doubt to the relief of those who bet the “over”, stuck it out to the final bell, although it looked touch-and-go whether he would make it.

Hopkins was the perfect ring mechanic, in the Archie Moore, Ezzard Charles and
Harold Johnson mould, and I can think of no higher praise. Like a lot of people — especially those who helped bet the odds up from an opening line of around -160 on Tarver to a closing price that was as high as -360 in some places — I am sorry I ever doubted him.




Last Updated: June 12, 2006 6:04pm