Bernard Hopkins: How I beat Kelly Pavlik
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‘How do you know how great you are without doubters?’
That’s the question Bernard Hopkins asked Monday during an extended explanation of how he shocked the boxing world with a unanimous (119-106, 118-108, 117-109) decision over previously unbeaten Kelly Pavlik on Saturday.
‘When I was done, I looked out at media row, stared out at the audience and I said, ‘I’m tired of proving myself.’ I had reached my boiling point. In and out of the ring, there’s nothing else I can do.’
What the 43-year-old Hopkins proved in his conquest of the 26-year-old middleweight champion from Youngstown, Ohio, is that when experience is teamed with fitness, youth and a powerful right hand stand little chance.
‘I’m hearing about a lot of 40-year-olds who saw the fight walking with their chest out ... you have to be skinnin’ and grinnin’ after seeing that,’ Hopkins said.
Hopkins said his Saturday night masterpiece -- which he claims surpassed his previous high-profile victories over Felix Trinidad and Oscar De La Hoya -- was triggered by homework. In studying Pavlik’s victories over Jermain Taylor, Edison Miranda and Gary Lockett, he said he noticed Pavlik continually ‘jabs and tries to line you up with his right.’
‘I asked myself, ‘Why not go to his left and make him punch across chest?’ That’s awkward to do. That was his problem.
‘I knew you can’t beat a great athlete in just one way. I admit sometimes the way I fight is not pretty, but I do what I got to do. I wouldn’t let him connect.’
Roiled by predictions that he’d suffer his first knockout loss, Hopkins spent the night sticking to his strategy, delivering a steady diet of rarely used jabs and punches that left the favorite bloodied and confused.
‘I took a page from the sweet science of boxing: hit and not be hit,’ Hopkins said. ‘We got too used in this sport to the Ultimate Fighting, big punch-type of fighting. I was sidestepping and he had to keep churning his legs. He had to adjust and didn’t know how. It was all about position, position, position.’
Now, Hopkins has a Nov. 8 fight to watch between the man who edged him by decision in April, Joe Calzaghe, and the veteran fighter who could secure a long-awaited date perhaps by the spring, Roy Jones Jr.
‘If we can get that fight [with Jones] everyone’s been waiting a decade for, in the [Madison Square] Garden, that’s a fight you don’t want to miss,’ Hopkins said.
-- Lance Pugmire
