Carlo Rotella
In deciding how to time the publication of a story about a boxer, a magazine typically has to choose whether to preview his next big fight or report on its outcome. I wrote the former kind of profile of the light heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins for the New York Times Magazine when he was approaching his fiftieth birthday and preparing to meet the formidable Sergey Kovalev. But Hopkins, to my mind the most sophisticated and accomplished boxer of our time, is not a subject whose measure I feel comfortable trying to take in a single pass. I’ve never liked the idea of updating an essay to uproot it from its moment of publication and replant it in a new one, and I wanted to write something original for this book, as the other contributors were doing. So I decided to write an entirely new postfight companion piece that, even though it begins months before the Kovalev bout, includes the fight and is written with the knowledge of its outcome. You have before you the resulting tandem entry. First up is “Prefight: The Baddest Forty-Nine-Year-Old on the Planet”; with only a few stylistic changes and my preferred title, it’s the New York Times Magazine story that ran on November 2, 2014, six days before Hopkins-Kovalev. Second comes “Postfight: Your Intelligence Come Up,” written in the summer of 2015, when Hopkins had both Kovalev and his fiftieth birthday well behind him and was deciding whether to fight again.
“There’s a god of this world,” Bernard Hopkins was saying. “Some say the mass media is the god of this world. It’s like a song, like that ‘Happy.’ They shoved it down my throat. At first I hated it. Why I got to be happy? My dog died! But it ended up being one of my favorite songs. They put one of those songs out every twenty years. No matter how bad your life is, no matter how legitimate your reasons for being upset, they say, ‘Don’t worry, be happy.’ Song’s only three minutes, then you stop being happy. The way they control human beings, like cattle. How do a sheepdog keep fifty or one hundred sheeps in order? I’m watching a dog keep a herd on TV, and I’m thinking that’s the way the system got most human beings: ‘Eat this. Drink that.’”
I had at some point asked him a question about boxing, but I hadn’t really expected a straight answer. Asking Hopkins a question is like trying to hit him. He won’t let you, but the experience of being frustrated by him can be instructive. Among other things, it can help you understand how Hopkins, the oldest champion in the history of boxing, continues to hang on to the title, his money, and his considerable wits at the age of—this is not a typo—forty-nine. Hopkins currently holds two of the four major light heavyweight belts and will try to further unify the division’s fragmented title on November 8, when he faces Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev, the unbeaten Russian knockout machine who holds one of the other two belts and who, though relatively untested, is widely considered one of the deadliest seek-and-destroy punchers of any size.
Unlike most other boxers, who train down to their fighting weight only when they have a bout coming up, Hopkins keeps himself right around the 175-pound light heavyweight limit. Fight people marvel at the ascetic rigor that has kept him perpetually in superb shape for almost three decades, his habit of returning to the gym first thing Monday morning after a Saturday-night fight, the list of pleasurable things he won’t eat, drink, or do. But to fetishize the no-nonsense perfection of his body, which displays none of the extraneous defined muscular bulk that impresses fans but doesn’t help win fights, is to miss what makes Hopkins an exemplar of sustaining and extending powers that are supposed to be in natural decline. He has no peer in the ability to strategize both the round-by-round conduct of a fight and also the shifts and adjustments entailed by an astonishingly long career in the hurt business. He has kept his body supple and fit enough to obey his fighting mind, but it’s the continuing suppleness of that mind, as he strategizes, that has always constituted his principal advantage.
Opponents don’t worry about facing his speed or power. They fear what’s going on in his head.
*
On a hot summer afternoon, Hopkins was having his hands wrapped in preparation for a workout at Joe Hand Boxing Gym in North Philadelphia. I had asked if he ever felt tempted to dumb down his subtle and hyperefficient boxing style—if he ever throws more punches than his exquisite ring sense tells him is necessary to win a round (which would increase the risk of being hit in return)—for the benefit of ringside judges unequipped to appreciate its nuances.
“I understand and I don’t understand human beings,” Hopkins began, warming up for the filibuster to come. “In life—I’m gonna give you life and also sport, intertwined—in life, when you start being conscious of what people are thinking or judging, you’re in trouble.” From there, he took off on his disquisition on the hegemonic power of mass media. It’s one of his favorite subjects, and also, he didn’t want to talk about judges, in keeping with his disinclination to discuss any topic related to fighting or training that might give even the slightest advantage to the large subset of the human race he regards as potential enemies. From “Happy” and sheepdogs he segued into a critique of the prison-industrial complex, another frequently recurring subject for Hopkins, who learned to box in his early twenties while serving five years at Graterford Prison, outside his native Philadelphia, for assorted felonies. “It’s privatized,” he said. “You can buy stock in prison! That means, when I do something”—illegal, he meant, that leads to imprisonment—“you can buy stock in me.” He’s not shy about pointing out that both private and public interests invest heavily in the social failure of black men. All the more satisfying, then, to have beaten the odds: “But I flipped the script on the norm.”
Hopkins is sure that “the shot-callers and string-pullers” yearn for his comeuppance. They and their pawns are always after him to quit, he said. “‘You got enough money.’ Now they counting my money! ‘We don’t want to see you get hurt.’ Where were they when I was walking off nine?”—a reference to the nine years he spent on parole following his release from prison in 1988, a period of self-reform and toeing the line that he considers the hardest thing he ever did. It’s part of a litany of youthful troubles and redemptive turns, a personal Stations of the Cross composed of vividly emblematic scenes from a life story that begins in the Raymond Rosen projects in North Philly and eventually arrives at the big home in suburban Delaware where he now lives. Along the way came three stab wounds collected before age fourteen, a prolific career as a violent street criminal culminating at seventeen in an eighteen-year prison sentence, jailhouse rapes and a murder he witnessed, the shooting death of his brother Michael, a Quran given to him by a fellow inmate that reawakened his faith, the bracing plunge via Graterford’s boxing program into the icy clarity of the gym and the ring, the warden who supposedly said “You’ll be back” when Hopkins was paroled.
Hopkins began playacting a scenario in which They look for a weakness with which to bring him down. “‘We gotta discredit him. Do he drink? He don’t drink. Do he run with whores? He don’t. He lives clean. He don’t party. He don’t use drugs. Who cooks his food? He cook his own food. He stands in line at Whole Foods with everybody else.’ So they try to find guys to beat me, and I beat them, and I get rich. They become part of my discipline.” Then he was off on another of his regular topics: the conspiratorial failure of Whole Foods, Nike, and other corporations to make a “poster boy” of him, a bad boy who became a good citizen and the most potently healthy-living middle-aged man imaginable. How come the marketers, who ate up George Foreman’s fuzzy-bunny routine and Lance Armstrong’s lies, aren’t lining up to pay for the celebrity-pitchman services of an outspoken Sunni ex-con who abjures alcohol, caffeine, refined sugar, processed grains, tap water, performance-enhancing drugs, weakness, and just about everything else other than winning fights and making money? This grievance is part of the eternal drama of Bernard Hopkins, a renewable energy source that helps keep him going strong in and out of the ring.
*
Hopkins climbed through the ropes and onto the canvas, stretched and shadowboxed for a while, and then spent a few rounds working on the mechanics of not being hit. A burly young man named Bear came after him with a blue foam wand in either hand, trying to tap him with simulated punches. Hopkins timed Bear’s advances, shifting the range between them to forestall blows, then stepped in close to put his shoulder on the bigger man, driving him back by expertly shifting his own weight. When Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” came on the gym’s sound system midround, Hopkins gave me a significant look over Bear’s shoulder: They never rest.
There are masters of defense who rely on will-o’-the-wisp elusiveness, making a spectacle of avoiding punches. Others build a fortress with their gloves, arms, and lead shoulder, deflecting incoming blows. Hopkins can slip and block punches with the best of them, but his defensive technique is founded on undoing the other man’s leverage by making constant small adjustments in spacing and timing that anticipate and neutralize attacks before they begin. It’s somehow never quite the right moment to hit Hopkins with a meaningful shot. Boxers, especially big hitters, feel a kind of click when the necessary elements—range, balance, timing, angle—line up to create an opening to throw a hard punch with proper form. Hopkins doesn’t run away, but an opponent can go for long stretches of a round without ever feeling that click.
Frank Lotierzo, a former boxer from Philadelphia who is one of the fight press’s best analysts of ring style, broke down some of Hopkins’s defensive habits for me: “You’ll notice he’s looking down a lot, watching the other guy’s front foot to see when it comes up, which it does when you step into a punch, and that’s when he makes his move. He ties up opponents’ elbows on the inside; you control the elbows, you control the arms. He never backs straight up; he’ll give you an angle every time. He will pick a side and go away from your power, isolate one side of your body, step over and fight you on your blind side.” Drawing from that repertory, Hopkins went around and around with Bear in a state of tautly maintained détente, discouraging wand-blows but not throwing any punches himself.
Naazim Richardson, Hopkins’s trainer (and Bear’s father), took over for a while, wearing a glove on one hand and a pad on the other to catch punches. A steady skullcapped presence in Hopkins’s corner, Brother Naazim, as he’s known, is more coconspirator than mentor. At this point, Hopkins, who received advanced instruction in his craft from English “Bouie” Fisher, George Benton, and other wise men of Philadelphia’s deep ring tradition, knows more about boxing than most trainers. Hopkins and the much larger Brother Naazim shoved and hauled in a series of messy tussles from which Hopkins would emerge to bang the pad with a clean shot or two. Hitting the pads, intended to ingrain accuracy and speed and precise punching form, has become for most boxers in training a largely empty exercise in self-affirmation. The trainer holds up the pads, and the fighter pop-pop-pops them with blisteringly impressive combinations in predictable rhythm, combinations that he’s unlikely to throw in the give-and-take of a real fight. But Hopkins was rehearsing a more realistic struggle in which he would spend a lot of time shifting and mauling to denature an opponent’s leverage, looking to create an opening in which to score with a sneaky inside shot.
*
Figuring out what the other guy wants to do and not letting him do it is a matter of policy for Hopkins. But it’s also an expression of his inmost character and worldview. He’s not so much a contrarian as a serial agonist who regards life as an unending train of struggles for the upper hand, and over the years he has come around to the premise that such a life is best lived through a relentlessly calculated managing of self rather than the self-destructive fury of all-out aggression. One key to his longevity at the top of the fight world is that he has come to consider it “barbaric” to exchange blows with an opponent. Hopkins, who listens to Sun Tzu’s Art of War while he does roadwork, will employ any tactic at his disposal, fair or foul, to frustrate an adversary—fighter, manager, promoter, TV executive, conversational foil—while he applies his strategic acumen to the problem of divining that adversary’s deepest intention and coming up with a scheme to nullify it while absorbing the absolute minimum of punishment.
After Hopkins’s record-setting reign as middleweight champion from 1995 to 2005, it was widely assumed that he would retire and duly enter the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Instead, he retooled his body to move up two weight classes, straight to 175 pounds from 160 without pausing at 168 (super middleweight), an unheard-of leap in the modern era, and thrashed the light heavyweight champion, Antonio Tarver, who was heavily favored to beat him. In middle age, Hopkins has made a specialty of flummoxing and defeating younger men who were supposed to have too much power for him: Tarver, Felix Trinidad, Kelly Pavlik, Tavoris Cloud, Jean Pascal.
Hopkins, who used to be known as the Executioner but now styles himself as the Alien, has a record of 55–6 with two draws; he will turn fifty in January. Imagine, if you’re looking for parallels in other sports, that the linebacker Ray Lewis did not retire at thirty-six last year and was still playing in the Pro Bowl and Super Bowl in 2026; or that Derek Jeter, who was fourteen when Hopkins had his first professional fight, decided to carry on past forty and was still playing in the All-Star Game and the World Series in 2023. But getting old in the ring is a far more brutal and unforgiving process than getting old on any playing field. Winning title fights is the highly visible part of a much larger spectrum of effort that includes giving and taking countless blows, weathering the grind of making weight, training more consistently and shrewdly than anyone else, guiding his own boxing and other business affairs, preserving the integrity of his fortune and brain function, and priming his seemingly inexhaustible motivational engine. Even great boxers tend over the long haul to lose the desire to do what it takes to win fights, but Hopkins’s sense of purpose, like his fighting mind, shows no signs of flagging. If anything, it’s getting sharper and stronger.
*
“To me, Bernard, he ain’t no real gifted athlete,” says Robert Allen, a former middleweight contender who was in his early thirties and already in decline when Hopkins (who is four years older than Allen) beat him in 1999 and 2004. “He’s just a little of everything on the average: average punching power, average hand speed.” Measured by the absurdly high standards of elite fighters, Hopkins’s only outstanding physical attribute is his chin—the ability to take a punch—which in his case has less to do with natural gifts than with conditioning, technique, experience, and will. Hopkins’s “ring generalship” is what sets him apart, Allen says. “The ring is like his home. It’s like he’s sittin’ on the couch watchin’ TV, relaxing. He’s like a snake, not even breathin’.” In 2011, Allen said of Hopkins: “He’s not really a fighter. It’s like something more political when you get in there with him.”
Hopkins has changed his style over time to accommodate advancing age, moving the emphasis to efficiency over action. A mature-period Hopkins fight goes the distance—he has never been knocked out, and he hasn’t knocked out an opponent since Oscar De La Hoya, ten years ago—and, considering they’re boxing matches, they don’t have that much hitting in them. His objective is to prevent the other man from doing much of anything at all so that Hopkins can win rounds with a few well-considered blows. Sometimes he shaves his margin of victory too fine, or the other man is just a little too active and strong, and Hopkins loses a close decision, but nobody ever gives him a beating. Louts who lust for blood may boo when Hopkins works his punch-expunging magic, but Sun Tzu, who taught that a wise general wins by attacking his opponent’s strategy rather than by risking the contingencies of pitched battle, would approve.
Hopkins’s former opponents describe fighting him as an ordeal and an education. First come the prefight head games. “He touched me, pushed me in my face at the weigh-in, and it worked,” Winky Wright told me. “It made me want to hurt him and knock him out, instead of outbox him.” Once in the ring, “he won’t allow you to do what you want to do,” as Allen put it; I heard versions of that phrase over and over from men who fought Hopkins. And when an opponent does sense an opening, that could well be a trap. “He’s always five steps ahead of you,” De La Hoya told me. Hopkins set him up for the diaphragm-paralyzing left hook to the body that ended their fight by letting De La Hoya delude himself into believing that he was coming on strong. “He let me throw some punches for a couple of rounds, let my confidence build up,” De La Hoya said. “I got a little too confident, let my guard down, and that’s when he hurt me with a punch I didn’t see.” Smiling ruefully, he added, “I really thought I was going to win the fight!”
A skilled fouler, Hopkins will also hold-and-hit, punch low, step on an opponent’s instep, and follow through with his own smooth-shaved skull after a punch to initiate a clash of heads. And he shamelessly complains about the dastardly things supposedly being done to him by the other guy. “When he bent over like I’d hit him low, he looked so wronged,” said the former super middleweight champion Joe Calzaghe, laughing. “But he was just buying some time.”
Hopkins has hung around in boxing long enough to profit from the passage of time. (The same goes for his extensive real estate holdings in once-depressed and now-gentrifying neighborhoods in Philadelphia.) Sixty or eighty years ago, when the sport was more popular and more deeply embedded in day-to-day life in industrial America, there were several fighters in every weight class who knew all the little things that together add up to Hopkins’s big edge in the ring. But no longer. Hopkins is an enduring atavism, a one-man history lesson in the boxer’s craft.
The men he has fought, even much younger ones, have slipped away into retirement in his wake. The will to fight diminishes, and the once-peerlessly toned body follows. “Oh man, I’m done,” Kelly Pavlik said when I asked him if Hopkins’s longevity gave him ideas about a comeback. De la Hoya said, “More power to him, but I’m done.” Winky Wright said: “I’m done. I play a lot of golf. It’s easier.”
*
Hopkins makes a habit of putting his hands on potential opponents to size them up, assessing their strength and feeling for weakness. In July, I watched him do roughly the same thing to a Showtime producer. Hopkins made a joke about being camera-shy—he’s not—just so he could laugh and slap the man’s shoulder, run a hand along his ribs, get a feel for whom he was dealing with. This habit can turn sitting and talking with him into a contact sport. He scoots his chair up to yours and bumps your knee with his own, as if striving for position. Leaning in so close that you can feel his hot breath on your face, he pokes and prods a shoulder, a forearm, jabs stiffened fingers into your torso just a little too hard, nominally to illustrate a point he’s making about digestion or human frailty or whatever. When I asked him about it, he said: “Feeling for softness is important to my diagnosis. Sometimes you can see and look, but you gotta feel to really check.”
At the time we were sitting face to face on folding chairs in the media room of the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Hopkins, a minority partner in Golden Boy Promotions, Oscar De La Hoya’s company, which he joined a couple of months after he knocked out De La Hoya in 2004, was in town to boost a fight promoted by Golden Boy. But we were talking instead about how he learned the business side of boxing. This part of his story is essential to understanding his longevity because it’s about rigorous self-knowledge. A great strategist knows his enemy, Sun Tzu says, but he also knows himself. Hopkins performed his own diagnostic routine on himself as a young felon and didn’t like the resulting self-portrait—that of a doom-seeking knucklehead—and so he found the discipline in boxing to go straight and make good. He examined himself again as a rising middleweight in his late twenties and, again, didn’t like what he found: a patsy who dutifully did all the hard work at the behest of others who took more than their share of the money.
So, armed only with native smarts and a jailhouse GED, Hopkins set out to turn a weakness into strength. “I started asking questions, trying to figure out how everybody else was making more than me, and I’m taking the punches,” he said. “I had to learn the business—international rights, marketing, license fees, the gate, concessions, merchandising, sponsors.” He did it on the sly at first. “I didn’t want to let people know I was trying to learn, or they would have tried to stop me, so I would ask questions about other fighters who set an example for me not to do.”
By 1995 he felt ready to take over his own boxing affairs, and he has managed himself ever since, employing lawyers and other “soldiers who do the legal mumbo jumbo” to help negotiate deals that allow him to take home a much greater share of the money he makes in the ring. “I started getting mines late in the game, once I realized I should know this before I became another fucked-up fighter,” he said. “If you don’t know your own value, somebody will tell you your value, and it’ll be less than you’re worth.”
Hopkins, who has put his ring earnings into a conservative business portfolio strong on real estate and bonds, resolved long ago not to end up punchy and cadging for handouts, as so many former fighters have. In addition to looking out for himself, he has a wife, Jeanette, and three children to provide for. He offers advice to younger fighters, like the undefeated super middleweight Andre Ward, who told me: “He’s always hammering home: ‘Nobody gets paid unless you get in the ring. So get what you’ve got coming, and save your money. Everybody likes nice things, but wait.’”
When I asked Hopkins about advising other fighters, he said, “I was perceived as a troublemaker” when he began managing himself, “because I was a slave who learned to read. Maybe I’m more of a troublemaker now—somebody trying to stand up for themselves and maybe influence others, teach the other slaves how to read.”
*
Bernard Hopkins may well be the best old fighter ever. Sugar Ray Robinson and Muhammad Ali, whose names come up often in discussions of the greatest fighters of all time, were both over the hill by their late thirties. Even among the few greats who fought into their forties—Bob Fitzsimmons, Archie Moore, George Foreman—it’s difficult to find parallels to Hopkins’s late-career run of lucrative high-profile victories over top-flight competition. Others who fought into middle age have typically ended up taking a pounding that made them look pathetic, but Hopkins gets hit less than ever these days, and his post-forty-year-old losses have been by debatable decision. And of course, Hopkins and his few near-peers in long-term success are all exceptions to the fight world’s Hobbesian norm of short primes followed by brutal declines. Consider Mike Tyson, who is a year younger than Hopkins. Tyson peaked in 1990 at twenty-four, and was effectively finished as a serious fighter by 1997.
Hopkins may be richer, more sophisticated, more patient, and (according to those who work with him) mellower and less abrasively paranoid than he used to be, but he’s constitutionally unequipped to grow overcomfortable in success. When I asked if he had been concerned, back when he started managing himself, that he might be blacklisted by the powers that be, he said, “I feel like I was blacklisted in 1965”—at birth. “I don’t get blinded by a few successful peoples, like Jay-Z or Oprah. I look at the people who didn’t make it—the penitentiaries, the thousands.” A handful of champions make serious money, but boxing remains fundamentally a sport for those who, like Hopkins as a young man, feel they have nothing to lose. While he had to outgrow that earlier version of himself in order to survive and prosper, he hasn’t lost touch with it. He used a mug shot of him taken in 1984 as wallpaper for his phone. He looks older in it than he does now, he says.
I asked, “Are we talking about the motor that makes you go?” and he wrong-footed me by coming back with a straight answer. “Yes,” he said. “Being the person I became, this is the person I am.”
Inspecting the shelves of the cosmetics and vitamins aisle of a Whole Foods Market in Las Vegas, lethally taut and hard amid products that vied to outdo one another in gentle harmlessness, Bernard Hopkins was the very embodiment of Raymond Chandler’s tarantula on a slice of angel food cake. He was talking on the phone with his lawyer. “I’ll fight whoever I can make more money with,” Hopkins said. “Whoever step up, I’ll fight him. Then the other one.” When the call was over he put a series of searching questions to a young woman manning a display table loaded with designer soap, and came away with an aromatic armload of purple and white bars. “Two for six dollars,” he said, grimacing with pleasure. Holding my gaze, he advanced his face to within inches of mine, as if inspecting me minutely for signs of insensitivity to a bargain. “Two for six! Smell this shit!” He waved a bar under my nose and went off around the corner into the next aisle, calling to Malik Chambers, a longtime member of his carefully chosen crew, “Get me some of that coconut water.” To me, he said, “No tap water. Never. And no white rice. Worst thing for you.”
It’s a never-ending source of offense to Hopkins that people are surprised to discover he’s so abstemious and measured in his habits, such a paragon of deferred gratification and fiscal prudence and other traditional Calvinist virtues of a capitalist society’s model citizen. Yes, he’s a miracle of longevity in a violently unforgiving trade and upward mobility from an extremely unpromising start in life, but at this point he’s also exactly the abstemious and measured type: a fiftyish guy with plenty of money who lives in the suburbs, associates with similarly moneyed professionals, works long hours, manages his investments with care, works out obsessively, eats whole grains and kale and egg whites, and derives a certain quiet upper-middle-class joy from shopping at Whole Foods. Such guys don’t often have the Raymond Rosen projects and Graterford Prison on their CVs, though.
We left the store and got back in the car—a black SUV, because if there’s a fighter with a title involved, especially in Las Vegas, you can usually count on a black SUV. Chambers, who was driving, held up the World Boxing Association (WBA) championship belt with one hand and said, “It’s a piece of junk and you can quote me. I don’t answer to nobody but God, and everybody else can kiss my ass.” Hopkins and his crew do not get sentimentally attached to titles, but belts do lead to bigger paydays, and the WBA light heavyweight title was one of two that he would be defending in his next fight. It was July, 2014, and he was in Las Vegas to help tout the Canelo Alvarez–Erislandy Lara bout for Golden Boy Promotions, but he was also negotiating to determine his own next opponent. Adonis Stevenson, a southpaw who loaded up big lefts, was moving out of the picture, and Sergey Kovalev, a colder-blooded two-handed hitter with a pressing style, was moving in.
We picked up Eric Melzer, Hopkins’s lawyer. Hopkins said, “This thing we’re going to,” a publicity shoot for Showtime, “is my look and likeness going to be used for profit?” Melzer, who is considerably younger and more rounded in contour than his client, said, “I think we’re good.” Later, Melzer mentioned that he doesn’t swim on the Sabbath, which led Hopkins down a circuitous path of associations to a vision of the afterlife of Jose Sulaiman, longtime head of the World Boxing Council (WBC), who had died a few months before. “Sulaiman up there charging God three percent,” said Hopkins, looking out the window. “You ever been to Phoenix? It’s hot, but they got lovely spas.”
After the Showtime shoot, heading back to the MGM Grand in the black SUV, Hopkins said, “My first rule in the game, I look to get fucked. I assume it. I expect to get fucked. Then it’s ‘How can I avoid getting fucked?’” He appeared to be addressing this lecture to Melzer, who represents other athletes in addition to handling details of Hopkins’s negotiations with opponents, promoters, and television networks. “You got to be patient,” said Hopkins. “In this business, if you don’t be patient, you overplay your hand and you get killed. Don’t commit to anything. A venue date is not a TV date.” He had November 8 reserved on HBO; they would nail down venue and opponent next. “You get the TV date first, venue is second. You gotta play poker.”
*
When I first went to see Hopkins on assignment for the New York Times Magazine, in Philadelphia in late June of 2014, I got little more from him than his stump speech—chunks of the recombinant verbal boilerplate he usually dispenses to reporters. His stump speech is of uniquely high quality, including as it does his homemade critiques of race in America, the hegemonic power of mass culture, and the prison-industrial complex, but it still consists of things he says all the time, even if sports reporters aren’t often interested in listening to it. Getting the stump speech the first time out is par for the course when I’m working on a magazine profile. I often schedule a first encounter on the subject’s home turf, a place where he or she is most comfortable and likely to present me with a preferred self. I met Hopkins at his regular gym, and what I got was Hopkins in declamatory character as The Fistic Sage of North Philly, playing not only to me but also to members of his crew who had heard it all many times before. When I got home I called Kelly Swanson, his high-powered publicist, and explained that I needed a second session somewhere other than the gym, and that in it he would have to extend himself beyond his stump speech. After checking with him, she promised that if I went to Las Vegas he would give me what I needed. That suited my purposes. I try to schedule at least one subsequent encounter somewhere other than on the subject’s preferred ground. While Hopkins has fought in Las Vegas many times, that crawling hive of pandemic indiscipline, impatience, and excess is not his safe happy place.
I caught up with Hopkins there in the MGM Grand’s media room. He was making the rounds of the morning radio shows set up at desks on raised platforms around the perimeter of the room. It was loud; overlapping radio voices chattered with forced energy in Spanish and English. Waiting to be called for his next radio appearance, Hopkins was telling a couple of guys a story about recently posing in the nude for ESPN’s Body Issue. He said, “I was good for two hours,” until a female photo assistant started applying body oil to him. “She was going up the back of my legs, and it’s like . . .” He stuck out his stiffened arm and turned from side to side so that fist and forearm banged into his auditors. “‘Oops. Excuse me.’”
While they were still laughing, he turned to me and hissed so that only I could hear, “I got up early and ran 880s on the track at UNLV. I’m not like these idiots.” He gestured around at the room full of people talking and talking and laughing and laughing. “Time is passing. What’s your plan?” The whiplash shift in tone made me feel like Frodo when he puts on the ring and enters a freakish ghost-space separate from whatever’s going on around him. Was Hopkins merely registering impatience, asking if I had a plan to get the most out of my interview time with him? Or did he have a more general philosophical message to convey, something on the order of Because life is short, it is good to have a plan for using your time wisely, so you don’t waste it on trivial nonsense like what’s going on in this room?
Later, when I took him aside for an extended sit-down in a corner of the media room, he told me about his practice of feeling for softness in the bodies of opponents, and he told me the tale of how he learned the business of boxing. It wasn’t his stump speech; I ended up putting a good deal of it in my story. We also talked about some other subjects that didn’t make it into the story.
He wanted to talk more about time, for instance. “I pay attention to time,” he said. “But the way I pay attention to time, it’s not a boogeyman. I pay attention to it based on who I am and what I give time to. It’s twenty-four hours in a day. Five of those hours you gonna be sleepin’. That leaves nineteen, eighteen hours. Gym time. Get dressed. Dealing with business.” He gave me a characteristic look, the ecstatic and alarmed grimace of a guitar player drastically bending a string. “These things are magnified in my head,” he went on. “I’m not a slave to the check. I respect the check. I respect time so much where that I know it’s time to eat, not when it’s too late. Your body talk to you. Your body even talk when you’re dead.”
I asked him to push past the usual discussion of age and retirement—people saying he should stop fighting before he gets hurt, Hopkins asking why they suddenly care about his welfare—and tell me how he would know when it was time to stop boxing. He rephrased the question, one of his favored rhetorical techniques: “Was there ever a time when you say to yourself, ‘I’m tired. Let me get out. I made my point’?” He understood asking the question at all to constitute yet another attempt to undermine or undo his achievement. “But wouldn’t that be what you want? To trick me amongst my labor and say, ‘Go off and get fat, and take your medications, and start having diabetes and enjoying your life and don’t help anybody else become the next champion, or the business or social side. Just go away. Don’t team up with Oscar. Don’t keep going.’” The essence of his defiance, he said, is “wanting a respect to force them to acknowledge that they can’t dictate a thought. It’s not up to them when I go. It’s up to God and me. And I’m hoping He’d give me a sign.” If how he lives, what he is, constitutes a perennial victory over his enemies, every day that he wakes up and is still recognizable to himself as Bernard Hopkins can be chalked up in the win column.
He also wanted to talk about LeBron James. On a nearby TV, sports anchors were updating the breaking news that James would be returning to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Hopkins praised James for sticking with an old friend as his agent rather than going with one of the usual suspects, a sign of independent thinking that qualified James in Hopkins’s view as “a slave who’s learning to read.” But no matter how much James got paid by a team that owned his labor, said Hopkins, “It’s still who can buy the slave with the most money. It’s like, ‘I’m gonna trade my Negro for your Negroes. Hey, this Negro got a ACL; I don’t want him.’ Like a horse. You think they love you, try to date they daughter.”
Hopkins and I were sitting face to face—a little too close, in the manner he prefers, so he could poke and prod and hunch in to look into my eyes from very close up indeed. When he did this he appeared to be endeavoring to read my mind through them, his own eyeballs flicking back and forth, taking in data and analyzing it. I had been happy to just listen and take notes during my visit to the gym in Philadelphia, but in Las Vegas I had begun interrupting his recursions to his stump speech. My time there was limited, and I wanted to make sure I got what I needed for my story. To smother my impatience to get back on topic, he deployed some of his trustiest moves: interviewing himself (“You might ask, ‘Bernard, how come . . . ?’”), going off on a riff (the LeBron excursus) so seamless that it left no room for me to wedge in a redirective question, playing to bystanders to stall me. At one point, he looked up and caught the attention of a man and woman sitting and talking quietly nearby. Pulling these strangers, who were black, into the conversation allowed him to restate in detail his analysis of the LeBron Situation, which they politely seconded, putting me in a position in which I would not only be rude to interrupt but would also be a white guy trying to stop a black man from talking with other black people about slavery so I could force him to talk about what I wanted to talk about. So I had to let him finish, which gave me occasion to sympathize with opponents whose elbows he controls in the clinches so that they can’t let their hands go.
Because the LeBron routine ate up a stretch of clock during which I couldn’t do anything but listen, it perhaps also gave him time to straighten out in his head the narrative of learning the boxing business he was about to recount to me. When Hopkins was good and ready, he let the temporarily dragooned couple go back to their chat and leaned back in to me to tell his own story, which resembled Frederick Douglass’s account of how he learned to read and write—that is, making moves toward taking ownership of himself without letting his oppressors know what he was up to.
While we were talking about the boxing business, I mentioned that I had spoken with a judge who had been impressed by Hopkins’s performance in court. He said, “The judge remembers me? That matters.” He has ended up in court quite a bit over the years, where his opponents have included Don King, Lou DiBella, and other major promoters. Hopkins hasn’t won every time, but he has acquitted himself well. “I’m still not very educated on law,” he said. “The words can seem—so many options, conflict of interest, giving things up in the future. But I know a lot more now than I did then.”
The federal judge I talked to, John L. Kane of the US District Court in Colorado, who heard Hopkins’s countersuit against the promotional company America Presents in 2004, said that Hopkins conducted himself on the stand “like a true gentleman; he was prepared and articulate, and he respected the court.” Testifying about the austerity of his life in training and his promoters’ failure to secure a promised payday, Hopkins succeeded in presenting himself as an earnest victim of dishonest and incompetent partners. “The people on the other side weren’t as reprehensible as some in the fight business,” said Kane, an enthusiastic boxing fan named for John L. Sullivan, “but they had some kind of Englishman on their side” (the South African–born promoter Cedric Kushner), “a big fat guy who was totally obnoxious on the witness stand. I was repulsed, he was so cynical. He was saying, ‘The fight business, it’s dirty, everybody in it is dirty, that’s the way it is.’ Bernard Hopkins looked up and said, ‘I guess I don’t have to tell you any more about it than he just did.’”
Kane told me that as a young lawyer he once represented Joe Louis, who spent the last years of his life in a pitiably broke and damaged state. The cold logic of the fight world, masked by a facade of sentimental regard for beloved warriors, ordains that eventual fate for even the greatest champions. “People see a money tree and start trying to pick off the fruit,” said Kane, “and to hell with the guy.”
Having taken steps to ensure that he will not end up like Louis, Hopkins does what he can to help other boxers. He testified at Senate hearings in favor of the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act—“not a perfect law,” he told me, “but it has some checks and balances”—and he offers advice to younger men willing to listen. Andre Ward is the best of them, a young Hopkins in many ways. When I was working on my Hopkins profile, Ward was embroiled in his own extended legal beef with his promoter, Dan Goossen, who had been part of America Presents when it first sued Hopkins in 1999, which led to Hopkins’s countersuit in Judge Kane’s court. Ward told me, “Bernard’s saying, ‘Be patient, stay in shape, this will pass. I beat Goossen in court. You can do it. Don’t get depressed.’ Those are nuggets, and they’re so valuable when you’re going through it all and getting upset and impatient.” When I asked Hopkins about offering advice to other fighters, he said, “Be the bad seed. Teach the other slaves how to read. ’Cause you get tired of just reading to yourself.”
When we were done talking in the media room, we met up with Malik Chambers. It was time for the trip to Whole Foods and the Showtime shoot. Hopkins walked with great purpose through the casino, accommodating fans’ greetings and requests for autographs without wasting time or motion. He welcomes attention and loves the camera, but he does not dive into crowds. The MGM Grand was holding some kind of dance competition featuring preadolescent girls in tarted-up gear. They looked horrible, over-made-up and underdressed, prematurely old. Hopkins steered among knots of them. When the gambling floor came into view, he said, “These people in there haven’t been to bed. These people haven’t changed their drawers.” Passing a packed restaurant, he said, “I don’t like buffets. You pay to try to kill yourself.”
The crowds disappeared when we went through a locked door separating the public space of the casino from its backstage areas—housekeeping facilities, service elevators, empty hallways that led to an employees-only exit, outside which the black SUV was parked in a VIP spot. “Human beings are fucked up,” Hopkins said, returning to our discussion of battling promoters in court for his rightful share. “Something is wrong with us. We the only creatures on this earth that’s unpredictable. A shark is predictable. A lion is predictable.” He watches nature shows on TV as if studying for an exam. “But humans—we grow up together, we know each other all our life, but then I cheat you. Why?”
*
The former opponents of Hopkins I talked to in the summer of 2014 were unanimous in feeling that Kovalev presented a dangerous matchup for him. When it comes to absorbing the effects of blows to the head, forty-nine is beyond ancient, and Kovalev was a big man in his prime with explosive power in both hands, not only at long range but also in close, where Hopkins normally counted on being able to score without taking much punishment in return. Hopkins had so far proven impossible to knock out, but the opponent most likely to accomplish it was Kovalev. It would be shocking, almost unthinkable, to see Hopkins reeling on rubbery legs around the ring, out of control and on his way to being counted out or saved by the referee’s sheltering embrace. If that happened, he might cease to be recognizable to anyone at all as Bernard Hopkins. It would seem . . . wrong, like seeing Bill Clinton struck dumb by a hostile question, or Barack Obama sloppy drunk and spoiling for a fight. Joe Louis was knocked through the ropes by Rocky Marciano; Muhammad Ali was humiliated by Larry Holmes’s pity; but nobody had ever seen Hopkins, even when he lost, get his ass comparably kicked. I asked him if, at any point in his life, he had ever been beaten so badly that he couldn’t continue or had to give up, and he said, “Never. When it got bad, I always found a way to make it at least respectable.” Nobody, as he put it, had ever managed to “undignify” him.
It seemed unlike Hopkins to allow hubris or greed to affect his judgment in choosing a matchup. If he had agreed to meet Kovalev, it was because he had coldly determined that he could beat him. A look at the thirty-one-year-old Russian’s record suggested a disparity in experience so great that it could potentially negate his manifest advantages. Gary Moser, a former accountant whom I count on to use statistics to deflate the reputations of undefeated heroes, wrote to me to say, “I’m guessing that Hopkins has seen, albeit in a less literal numbers-driven way than is my meat, what I saw this morning by devoting a mere half-hour or so to deconstructing Kovalev’s glossy 25–0–1 (23 KOs) record. A full 20 of Kovalev’s opponents came into their bout with him with no more than a 1-bout winning streak. As for the other 6 opponents, the one with the most imposing record—Cedric Agnew, 26–0–0—came in having beaten 2 guys in their pro debuts, 21 guys who had lost their most previous bout, and 3 guys who HADN’T lost their most previous bout . . . but had records of 1–0, 1–0 and 10–12–1, respectively. PLEASE!!!!!”
Kovalev would probably have to go the distance to beat Hopkins, and he had never gone more than seven rounds. Lesser opponents like Blake Caparello and Cedric Agnew had proven that he could be hit and hurt by even an average puncher, a significant liability for a pressing fighter, and that he had displayed signs of becoming confused and frustrated when things didn’t go his way. And Hopkins, who had been at ringside for Kovalev-Agnew, had to have noted that Agnew had cut Kovalev and put him down for the first time in his career with a headbutt, a genre of fouling in which Hopkins displayed great virtuosity.
It was possible for Kovalev to be both a genuinely dangerous puncher and an unseasoned champion who hadn’t faced anyone who could have given him even an inkling of what it would be like to face an opponent as skilled and experienced as Hopkins. As Kelly Pavlik, Antonio Tarver, and other fearsome hitters who were supposed to destroy Hopkins had discovered, power that you can’t apply doesn’t do you much good, and Hopkins was remarkably adept at figuring out what an opponent wanted to do and preventing him from doing it. Still, beating Kovalev was a tall order for him. The Philadelphia boxing writer Frank Lotierzo told me, “Hopkins is already the best old fighter of all time, but if he beats Kovalev and Stevenson he’ll be unspeakable.”
*
Boxing offers frequent reminders that two men of about the same height and weight can be of drastically different sizes, but each fresh instance of this bedrock truth comes as a small revelation. From ringside at the Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City on November 8, 2014, it seemed to me that Kovalev, who is an inch shorter than Hopkins and has a shorter reach, was twice his size. Hopkins, in his usual perfect fighting trim, looked like a big middleweight; the shovel-faced Kovalev, like a cruiserweight who had somehow squeezed himself into a vulpine 175-pound frame.
I figured that, beyond the usual business of interdicting Kovalev’s leverage and timing, Hopkins was going to have to do something especially tricky or nasty to denature Kovalev’s advantage in size, power, and youth. Hopkins would have to take a risk by leaving an opening to lure him in for a sneaky counter, or headbutt the shit out of him to scramble his wits and perhaps open a cut that would throw him off his game.
The challenge, for Kovalev, was to do something he had not done before: take something off his punches, sacrificing power for precision, and keep up the pressure without trying to take Hopkins’s head off. Nobody was ever going to beat a defender as refined as Hopkins by loading up leverage to hit him flush with big shots. A bigger man stood a better chance of hitting him by shortening up his swing and just trying to make contact, going for singles rather than home runs. It’s difficult for a big hitter to do that, to exploit his advantage in power not by bringing it all to bear at once, which is his inclination by instinct and training, but by distributing it into controlled punches that are still hard enough to win the fight. The hulking Wladimir Klitschko had done it against the blown-up middleweight defensive wizard Chris Byrd, throwing a steady stream of three-quarters-force punches that prevented Byrd from doing much of anything. But a lot of big hitters couldn’t rein themselves in like that. Wladimir’s brother Vitali, for instance, lost his own bout with Byrd, quitting on his stool and claiming the usual shoulder injury, worn out after nine rounds of trying to obliterate the much smaller man with titanic blows and leaving himself open to Byrd’s shrewd harrying counterattack.
I knew Hopkins was in trouble when Kovalev knocked him down in the first round with a chopping counter right that clipped him on the temple as he came off the ropes—not because of the knockdown itself, which no more than disturbed Hopkins’s balance for a moment, but because Kovalev didn’t freak out afterward. Knocking Hopkins down could have sent him into a finisher’s frenzy, going all-out to put him away and leaving himself open to counters. In that sense, the knockdown could have put the younger man off his game as surely as being hurt himself. But Kovalev stuck to the plan he had worked out with John David Jackson, his trainer, who knew Hopkins well, having been TKO’d by him in 1997 and then having trained him for the Tarver fight in 2006.
After the knockdown, just as before it, Kovalev kept his distance, cutting off the ring with unhurried persistence and stepping back whenever it appeared that Hopkins was going to find a way to close with him. He patiently held back his right so that he had it ready to throw over Hopkins’s left. He didn’t rush and he didn’t get flustered, even when Hopkins did manage to reach him with a right or a lunging hook. Kovalev would step back, resisting the booming puncher’s natural urge to respond with a broadside, and Hopkins would have to reset himself, faced all over again with the daunting task of working through Kovalev’s field of fire to close with him.
Kovalev piled up rounds, winning every one on every judge’s card. He wasn’t giving Hopkins a life-changing pummeling, but he was decisively defeating him. Only in the final round, after Hopkins buckled Kovalev’s knees with a counter left, did Kovalev open up and come after him with less caution, but by then it was much too late for Hopkins, who was no one-shot comeback puncher. Kovalev jolted him with several shots to the head in the final round, a sight startling to behold, but Hopkins weathered the surge, answering with punches of his own. It was that rarest of spectacles in a late-career Hopkins fight, an exciting action round, and he survived it by a slimmer margin than he let on.
The outcome wasn’t close; a shutout: 120–107, 120–107, 120–106. Kovalev had fought a surprisingly astute and disciplined fight, and Hopkins had not come close to solving him. He had figured out what Kovalev and his corner wanted to do, but lacked the wherewithal to work his usual negating sorcery on a potent opponent whose desire was to not take his head off—a diabolically restrained objective for a seek-and-destroy hitter in his prime. It was by far the worst defeat of Hopkins’s career, but in the end it was just a bad day at the office. About the only thing Kovalev had failed to accomplish on his night of triumph was to undignify Hopkins.
*
Hopkins dominated the postfight press conference, and Kovalev, whose English was a work in progress, seemed happy to concede it to him. Hopkins bragged only enough to demonstrate that his spirit had not been broken, and he was graciously but not self-servingly effusive in his praise of Kovalev and his corner. “He was smart and he was patient and he didn’t get caught up in emotions when I tried to suck him in,” said Hopkins, his right cheekbone purple with damage. He acknowledged the success of Jackson’s game plan in dictating on what terms the fighters would engage, and he gave Kovalev credit for technical skill, not just for being too big and strong for him.
“Tonight he was the better man, and that’s cut and dry,” said Hopkins. “You can’t water that down.” When asked if he would seek a rematch, he said, “A rematch with who? . . . What?” When asked if he would fight again, he said, “Askin’ me to fight right now is like asking a woman who was in labor to have another baby.” The defeated fighter’s tenderness, the vulnerability and introspection you will see in even the hardest tough guy who has taken a beating, showed up in him as rueful noblesse. When asked how he felt about passing the torch in the light heavyweight division, he said, “He already got the torch. I don’t have to pass it.”
Watching him at the podium, his sharp edges blunted by fatigue and his roughness smoothed by disappointment, I was reminded of a conversation I’d had with George Foreman before the fight
I had called Foreman, who staged a successful comeback and reclaimed the lineal heavyweight title in middle age, to ask what he thought of Hopkins fighting on at forty-nine. Like almost every other retired fighter I talked to, Foreman didn’t like the matchup and wanted Hopkins to retire before he got hurt too badly to enjoy his dotage. “I’m sixty-five years old,” Foreman said. “I roll on the floor with my grandkids, I have a good time. You want your brain to be in order in your older age, and one punch can change that. One punch can wreck every little dime you set up, the fortune, the scholarships for your kids, all that. He got nothing else to prove. Boxing is not a sport for the wealthy. It’s not polo. Get your money and get out.”
But, he added, old fighters do get better in some ways, if they’re serious about their craft. They get wiser, shrewder, and they don’t waste energy in the gym, in the ring, or out on the street. “I got to be a better boxer,” he said of himself in his thirties and forties. “You practice more, work harder in the gym, instead of chasing after fast women and slow horses. You figure a man out. You always got an angle.”
No fighter of our era—and few of any era—exemplifies Foreman’s point as well as Hopkins. Watching him on the podium, defeated and fallen short of unspeakable, but not undignified, I thought that even this punishing day, and the next, would go in the win column for him. He would wake up in the morning and still be recognizable to himself as Bernard Hopkins, bruises and all. And I thought of something Foreman had said to me about what it’s like to be an old fighter: “Your ego die a bit, but your intelligence come up.”