Bernard Hopkins Is Not Finished: Fighting for History, He Turns Back the Clock

Admit it, you've counted him out. 

Every boxing fan has done it, myself included. I bet you can even remember when you did it. 

Maybe it was after he gave away the middleweight championship to a terrified Jermain Taylor by doing next to nothing for 24 rounds; maybe you held out until just recently, when he teamed with Roy Jones to put on one of the ugliest, lousiest fights you could possibly imagine that didn't involve John "Huggy Bear" Ruiz.

For me, it came when Hopkins fought Joe Calzaghe. 

Calzaghe hit Hopkins late in the fight below the belt with what appeared to be a grazing, harmless shot. Hopkins dropped to the canvas and thrashed around like Zed in Pulp Fiction after Bruce Willis shot his manhood off. He took a very long time to compose himself before continuing.

He looked like a guy who could not handle the pressure, a fighter who could no longer fight for all three minutes of each round.

I picked Kelly Pavlik to destroy him after the Calzaghe fight. What did the old guy do?

He spent all 12 rounds knocking Pavlik around the ring, completely outboxing him, throwing combinations and embarrassing a much younger fighter. 

When B-Hop stared down press row after that huge win, I apologized from my couch while soiling myself.

Not really. I lied about the apology.

Hopkins has his drawbacks. His style of fighting makes for some mind numbingly boring fights. 

He doesn't throw many punches, he holds a ton and he mauls on the inside instead of working. He has never had a huge fan base for those reasons. 

If you can get by all that, you may realize that you are watching a defensive master. He is unbelievably adept at taking his opponent's best weapon and rendering it useless.

He froze Antonio Tarver stiff; he took Winky Wright's fantastic jab and used it to counter him to the point where Wright simply gave up throwing it after the sixth round of their fight; he ran Pavlik into any punch he wanted to throw; he even reduced the great Joe C into an inaccurate, slapping mess in a close loss. 

Note to Jean Pascal: YOU WILL NOT LOOK GOOD FIGHTING BERNARD HOPKINS. No one does.

Bernard Hopkins feeds off of perceived disrespect. 

He uses it to train, he uses it to motivate himself and he uses it to prove that he can hang with anyone, no matter how old he is. 

He also feeds off of history. 

He couldn't care less about the WBA, WBC, NABF, IBF or any other lame paper belt that comes along. The fight against Pascal on December 18th on Showtime is for the lineal, Ring Magazine, light heavyweight championship. 

If he wins, at 45 years old, he becomes the oldest fighter of all time to become world champion. 

We've picked against him before, and he's proven everyone wrong. It's tough to find someone now to pick against him. 

How can you?