Bernard Hopkins
Bernard Hopkins
Bernard Humphrey Hopkins Jr.is an American professional boxer who has held multiple world titles at middleweight and light heavyweight. He reigned as middleweight champion from 1994 to 2005, unifying and successfully defending his title a record 20 times. He won the IBF title in 1994, later adding the WBC, WBAand The Ring magazine titles in 2001, and became the first man to simultaneously hold world titles by all four major sanctioning bodies when he won the WBO title in 2004;...
ProfessionBoxer
Date of Birth15 January 1965
CityPhiladelphia, PA
Everything rides on Dec. 3. This fight is important because that's where Bernard Hopkins will show that anyone who went through the minefield again with him is in trouble. I've beaten everyone who got into the ring with me a second time, and some of them I sent into retirement. I have to deal with the clouds and the storm. You think you got me down and I rise up.
The thing that most people don't understand is that I don't believe I lost the last two fights, which is why I am coming in a confident fighter. Tarver says I am fighting him for one more payday, but what Tarver don't realize is that I could have picked anyone to fight and still gone out making millions of dollars. But I chose to fight Antonio Tarver because, like I have said many times, I want to do what my boxing idol, Sugar Ray Robinson, couldn't do, and that's win the light heavyweight championship.
I wouldn't take any fight or do anything that I think I can't win.
I got knocked down. Anybody could be knocked down, anybody can be knocked out, but it's not what happened, but what happens next.
I was knocking guys out in the streets before I knew how to throw a jab and keep your chin down, In most neighbourhoods, the guy that could fight gets respect. You got in the parties free. I never had to pay the dollar because people were scared of me. But back then I was ignorant.
I've got a history of frustrating guys and making them angry.
You think it's hard for me when I go in the ring and fight? That's the least of my problems. I think about the five years that I did in prison. I think about the nine years on parole. Nothing - nothing! - can compare to that struggle. I'm telling you, from being an ex-convict with 30 convictions, a degree nowhere to be found and black? I'm done.
There's always a chance you will see something new in a fight. Especially in boxing.
The controversy was that Chad Dawson thought he was in an MMA fight and not a boxing match.
Anybody who thinks I'm taking this fight for a paycheck doesn't know me. My whole life I've been achieving the impossible.
The streets was basically my parents.
I wouldn't wanna fight me, because I know it wouldn't be a good outcome for both.
If I'm in a situation where Duane Ford is one of the judges, I have to pick it up.
This fight isn't about boxing, it's something deeper than that.