Bernard Hopkins Faces Final Bout

Bernard Hopkins

Image: John Gichigi/Getty Images

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Bernard Hopkins refuses to go gently into the twilight of retirement.

A major prizefighting provocateur for two decades, Hopkins, now an age-resistant 43, will face 36-year-old Joe Calzaghe on April 19 in Las Vegas in what looks to be the final bout of his brilliant career.

Unless something changes.

Considered by many to be the greatest middleweight of his era, Hopkins, who set the division record with 20 title defenses, had promised his mother that he would not fight beyond age 41. In June 2006, he moved up to 174 pounds to challenge former light-heavyweight champ Antonio Tarver, and then insisted that the fight would be his swan song.

Hopkins ended up manhandling Tarver and winning a lopsided but unanimous decision. “I’m done,” he announced at his gala retirement party in Vegas. “There’s nothing else to do.”

But last summer, at 42, Hopkins was back in the fray, defeating Ronald “Winky” Wright on points to raise his record to 48-4-1 and claim The Ring magazine’s light-heavyweight title. “I never lost my motivation or my competitive desire,” explains the self-styled “Executioner.”

With his bullet-hard eyes and fisticuffs-honed abs, Hopkins still looks as if he has been hammered on the anvil of the gods to be an emblem of war. “I wanted not to have any regrets of me not finishing up the way I wanted to finish up,” he says, “especially knowing I had something left.”

As a pensioner, his purses total $11 million. Indeed, the $8 million that he will earn on Saturday night is the second-largest payday of his career.

In Calzaghe, Hopkins will face a gritty Welsh southpaw who is undefeated in 44 fights. Though Hopkins will enter the ring as a 3-to-1 underdog, he’ll no doubt take solace in the fact that he has defeated 11 lefthanders during his pro career, with no losses.

“Out of all the things I have accomplished in my life and career, this bout will be super-duper testimony to the legacy I will leave behind,” the boxer says. “The only fight to me that really makes sense right now is no fight. I don’t need to fight anyone, that’s the simple truth.”

Win, lose, or draw, Hopkins says that this will be his finale: “Whether I want to retire or not, I think I’m forced to retire, because I ran out of opponents. I’m not going in there dancing with no 24- or 25-year-olds. I don’t pick on nobody unless they’re 35 and up. There’s no one in the game at a high level able to satisfy my craving. I ran out of really quality names to fight.”

Hopkins is an animated talker whose conversation moves by digression. Actually, he doesn’t talk—he comes at you. And he comes at you unceasingly with rat-a-tat words, like peas from a peashooter, the same way he goes after opponents in the ring.

His conversation veers happily from topic to topic like a bumper car in an amusement park. A 10-minute interview will stretch into a 90-minute discourse on the state of boxing, the nation, ancient Greece, mayoral politics in his native Philadelphia, and the possibility that Barack Obama will be assassinated if he beats Hillary Clinton.

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