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Bernard Hopkins: Boxing's angry man

He fights Antonio Tarver on Saturday. He has fought society for years.
By Don Steinberg

NEW ORLEANS - You rarely get what you expect when you ask Bernard Hopkins a question. The former middleweight champion, after decades of vindictive battles in and out of the ring, seems to have honed such a preemptive mistrust of anyone who questions him that his answers seldom travel a straight line. They zigzag and double back and turn down dark alleys as if he's trying to slip a tail.

His sentences run on. His fertile mind runs faster, often leaving his sentences gasping behind, unfinished.

The interview, in his top-floor suite at his hotel-based training camp in late May, was supposed to explore how Hopkins - 41 years old, coming off two losses, moving up two weight classes - stands any chance of winning his supposedly career-ending fight Saturday night against the younger, bigger Antonio Tarver in Atlantic City.

Instantly, though, Hopkins was off in another direction, talking about Bill Russell and Jim Brown, Satchel Paige and Muhammad Ali, "not great black athletes, strong black men" who stood up to the system, just as - Hopkins won't let us forget - he has.

Redemption is a constant theme for Hopkins, who went to prison at age 17 for muggings and robberies, came out, stayed clean, kept winning, defied the industry's powers, and held onto his money.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin "said some things some people in boxing have wanted to say for a long time" about racial attitudes in America, Hopkins said. Many criticized Nagin, and then he won reelection.

"Like Gandhi - we win!" Hopkins said.

OK. What about Tarver? He's a light heavyweight - two weight classes above middleweight.

"They thought that Bernard Hopkins would be humble and quiet once I got some money. And they're now saying, 'Damn, he's worse now. It's not a front with him.'

"You have people - and you have special people that will go down in history not for what they have accomplished but what they went against even when things was good for them.

"What about the 5-foot-5 lady who got tired because she had bunions on her foot and said, 'Today, I'm not sitting at the back of the bus.' What was that? That changed the game. Forever. A 5-5 lady. There was a lot of big, strong 200-pound men who ran in the back, didn't want to fight.

"What I try to do is use Bernard Hopkins' 'star power,' or credibility, to say to people, 'It's like, yo, don't get caught up in this plague of society where you become somebody's investment in jail and you're converted to modern-day slavery. Instead of having you on a field, picking cotton, they get you cornered to make bad decisions because things are the way they are.

"You don't have to be on a field. You can be in somebody's prison that they're building all around the world. Jails are not being closed. They're being built all over. So now they're figuring out a way to capitalize off your ignorance. That's what kept me out of the penitentiary over 27 years.

"I was illiterate when I went to jail. Couldn't read. Couldn't spell. Couldn't add. When I seen what I seen at 17, 18, 19, 20, came home 23 years old, I told myself, 'Look man, I ain't coming back here.'

"I used to rob drug dealers and people in the neighborhood. I never had a gun. We're on the block, right? You're the big man. You got the whole block locked down. You got three or four thousand in your pocket. You're the man.

"Now here comes Bernard Hopkins, coming up Germantown Avenue. Now I strong-arm you. Beat you up. Take your jewelry. Take your watch, and I'm gone. Now I'm expecting retaliation. But instead police is at my mom's house. They're ready to get me off the streets or shoot me. I got arrested like 30 times. I got stabbed three different times by three different people."

He lifted his shirt to show scars.

"I had mad respect in prison as champion for five years. They knew me. If I wanted to rape somebody, it was easy. If I wanted to take somebody's stuff, it was easy. 'Yo, man, this dude coming in, wanna extort him? No, that young dude, leave him alone.' You're boxing on E block. 'How many packs you betting?' Because packs of cigarettes, that's money. Go down the gym, all the inmates around. Jokers dressed up with lipstick on. About 300 people in the gym, and we rumblin'. Get my cigarettes and roll. 'See y'all tomorrow, man.' 'All right, champ.'

"I converted that work mentality from running that yard, from not being involved in the activities that was going on. I took that mentality that I prepared myself in prison at 17 and converted that outside society, which is very hard for most of us. And that's why the average athlete is not fighting to win the way I have to win... .

"Fight time, it's not that I underestimate nobody, but I don't fear nothing. How can I fear something when I'm 17 years old, a baby, a young kid? Well, young kids get raped. So here's a young kid being certified at Philadelphia City Hall, sent off to prison, a man's prison. Mother's crying, right? Murderers, rapists, child molesters, hustlers, con artists.

"If you show fear, you're already prey... . I went in there, 'You mess with me, you might get me, I might get you, but I ain't backing down.'

"Any second of the day after I was out, with a GED from jail, with nine felonies, with no big degree from college, I could have easily given up. Lost my first fight. You think you want to be tested? Wait till the storm comes. So I go out and lose my first fight. Was that a testimony of will?

"So isn't it ironic that I lose my first fight in Atlantic City as a light heavyweight, and you're going to end your career on a high note, back in Atlantic City, at light heavyweight?... Goes all around the experience of life and trials and tribulations, court battles, and he winds back where he starts. Not in the penitentiary. In Atlantic City, at light heavyweight! And then we win. Gandhi - and then we win! It's laid out for me."

So, for the Tarver fight, do you have a set strategy or just a general approach?

"You hear what this guy just asked me? He asked me - he probably went to college, too - he asked me, 'Y'all guys got a strategy?'... Do they have reporter school? It ain't a strategy if I tell you... . How long you been doing this? No disrespect... .

"Yeah, I got a strategy... . I'm just going to show up June 10 and just swing, swing, swing and hope I hit something. That's the only thing I can give you."

Words, not punches, fly at news conference

NEW YORK - Bernard Hopkins wasn't thrilled about having to go from New Orleans to New York to promote the fight he is having against Antonio Tarver on Saturday night in Atlantic City.

While training in New Orleans, he griped about having to make yesterday's roundabout, half-day pit stop in Manhattan just to accommodate what he affectionately characterized as - let's put this politely - a bunch of lazy reporters.

"It's retarded," he said.

But then, the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, which is sponsoring the fight and hosting a separate boxing show tonight, offered to fly Hopkins from New York to Atlantic City in a private jet immediately after the news conference, and everything worked out fine.

The news conference turned out fine. Tarver praised Hopkins, the longtime middleweight champion, for a record-setting career, then unveiled a wooden rocking chair he brought for the 41-year-old.

"Before I lay thee down to sleep, we'd like to present Bernard Hopkins with something he can use in retirement," Tarver said.

"I'll take it," Hopkins said. "Make sure you all wrap it up. Don't let him take it back."

Later, after the boxers' promoters, fitness gurus and trainers had their say, two of the most loquacious athletes in the sport got back into it.

"At the end of the day, your record reflects your credibility," Hopkins said, contending that Tarver had won few signature boxing matches. "We have things in this society called resumes, and a lot of times you're judged by that. [Tarver] is a one-hit wonder. You take away the one hit and he has nothing there."

Tarver, who is betting Hopkins $250,000 that he will knock out Hopkins within five rounds, said he was eager to prove himself to a public that, he feels, still doesn't give him proper respect.

"It's mind-boggling to me" that the fans "still can't see it," he said. "And that is what Bernard Hopkins will understand early, and he's going to understand that often."

Then the two of them stood face-to-face, saying bad things to each other for several minutes.

"I'm not throwing any punches I'm not getting paid for," said Hopkins, who seemed amused by the exchange.

The flight from Teterboro Airport to Atlantic City is 19 minutes in the air, about the same length as one of Hopkins' spoken sentences. The welcoming committee at the Borgata, where Hopkins is staying as he prepares for what he says will be his final fight, included four "Borgata babes" who posed with the fighter. Where was Tarver? He arrived about 20 minutes later, also flown down from New York in a private jet. A separate one.

"Had to," said Larry Mullen, president of the Borgata.

Tonight's bouts at the Borgata will be televised on ESPN2 at 10:30. The main event features undefeated junior middleweight Demetrius Hopkins (23-0-1), Bernard's nephew, defending his USBA title against Michael Warrick (18-3-0)