By Bart Barry-
Saturday in Atlantic City in another hideous but portentous mismatch on HBO, Russian light heavyweight titlist Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev raced through a helpless Australian named Blake Caparello, stumbling out the block and getting flashdropped in round 1 before spearchiseling his way to a TKO-2 result whose time was irrelevant and preordained. For the first time in Kovalev’s career as an HBO fighter, though, Saturday’s portentous match actually portended something, as word came last week Kovalev will fight Bernard “The Alien” Hopkins in November.
Bless Bernard Hopkins for making this fight.
Bless Kovalev, too, and Kovalev’s handlers, too too, and HBO and Oscar De La Hoya – whose canning of Richard Schaefer allowed others to begin imagining something like this – and even Showtime, whose subversion of HBO’s plans for a Kovalev match with Adonis Stevenson ignited, finally, a fire beneath the throne at HBO Sports. Barring a similar act of audacity by Gennady Golovkin’s handlers, Kovalev-Hopkins is now the most-anticipated fight of 2014.
There is a very real chance Bernard Hopkins will beat Sergey Kovalev, and whereas it might once, even recently, have brought a foreboding that went “what the hell kind of professional sport gets dominated by a 50-year-old?” the fact becomes ever clearer this probably is the worthiest era in our sport’s history for a stamp in crimson dye that reads: DOMINATED BY A 50-YEAR-OLD. Why the change of heart? In signing to fight Kovalev, remorseless and mean-spirited as any contemporary practitioner of fisticuffs, Hopkins demonstrated a willingness to imperil himself for greatness’ sake that none of his young inferiors possesses.
Hopkins now acts both as a counterargument to Gennady Golovkin’s small army of apologists who just can’t seem to find a fitting opponent anywhere they look, and a large black asterisk historians’ minds must set beside Floyd Mayweather’s name: *Did not fight his era’s best.
Notice what did not precede last week’s delightful announcement. No mention of Machiavellian advisors, no bickering about purse splits on message boards, no talk of one man’s cowardice matching the other’s stupidity, no insiders’ analysis of why promoters are obdurately opposed to what is best for their sport, and most blessedly of all, no midnight conference call to announce people not-fighting.
Two thoughts on why Hopkins may beat a genuinely frightening dude in his prime – frightening because who but Kovalev in the annals of boxing tragedy increased his knockout percentage after killing a man in the ring? – and apply with an alien precision his looniest stroke yet to this era: 1. Something Kovalev’s first U.S. trainer said, and 2. Kelly Pavlik.
Going in reverse order, and for those old enough to remember, Pavlik, in 2008, was the undefeated, undisputed, lineal middleweight champion of the world, having done it the right way, stretching the man, Jermain Taylor, who beat the man, Bernard Hopkins, who, by 2008, was a sprightly 43 year-old super middleweight six months removed from being outclassed by Welshman Joe Calzaghe. Pavlik was expected to overwhelm Hopkins the way volume punchers tend to overwhelm boxers, especially volume punchers possessed of a right cross like Pavlik’s. Suddenly Hopkins was not a boxer or counterpuncher, though, but a slugger, leaping at Pavlik in the opening round with left-hook leads to the Ohioan’s durable liver.
It was impossible Pavlik had trained for such an attack from a man who’d managed to take an athletic actionfigure like Taylor in 2005 and make with him 72 minutes of defensive awfulness not to be surpassed in dullness until Erislandy Lara fights Erislandy Lara. With those Hopkins left hands, though, went the trajectory of Pavlik’s right cross. Whatever ailments and dissipation Pavlik suffered immediately before he threw hands with Hopkins, his cross never flew right because Hopkins lowered Pavlik’s elbow six reflexive inches in the opening three minutes. Hopkins will do something similarly unexpected to Kovalev in their opening stanza, something neither the Russian nor his American trainer John David Jackson prepares for, and how Kovalev adjusts, what sort of plan-B game Kovalev possesses, will determine the match’s outcome.
Beside Jackson in Kovalev’s corner in November will be Don Turner, one of the few remaining sages in our sport and the man into whose North Carolina gym Kovalev strolled years ago.
“(Sergey) doesn’t hit that hard,” Turner told me in September. “He hits you on-time. When you hit a guy on-time, you’re punching him twice as hard as you naturally would.”
Here then, in the form of a question, lies the enormous challenge rushing at Kovalev: Who has ever hit Bernard Hopkins on-time? Kovalev runs opponents into his power, cocking a right cross with a left hook that was cocked by a right cross. He is a volume puncher with menacing force and radioactive meanness. But Hopkins has fought dozens such men. Whom that Kovalev has fought begins to approximate Hopkins in craft, experience or wiles?
But as a friend of mine said Saturday night, crashing together metaphors in the way men do in relaxed conversation after witnessing barbaric spectacles: “So long as you don’t look in Medusa’s eyes, Father Time stays undefeated.”
If Kovalev does not bite on Hopkins’ prefight lures, and here language barrier shall serve the Russian well, he can set a pace Hopkins cannot possibly abide a few months before his 50th birthday, and if that happens, the beating Kovalev bestows on “The Alien” will be otherworldly. But there remains a very real chance it will not happen, and if it doesn’t and Hopkins somehow beats Kovalev, may this period henceforth and universally be known as the Hopkins Era.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
