Boxing is perhaps the most intimate sport in the world. No helmets or shoulder pads to separate the participants; no diamonds, pitches, or hardwood to keep them apart, with only sporadic bursts of one-on-one activity. It pits two athletes, stripped to the waist, in an enclosed ring with only gloves on their hands to perform their jobs.
But you knew this already. What may not be immediately evident is that with such intimacy comes the deeper sport, a game where the mental sanity of the participants is tested on a constant basis, from the first press conference to the final staredown. Oh, the fighters will hug each other and say all the right things after the fight, but before it, you need to get whatever edge you can when you don’t have a quarterback’s arm to get your running game out of trouble, or a pinch-hitter to come off the bench to hit in place of your pitcher.
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That’s where Bernard Hopkins makes his living. Not in the ring, where 20 middleweight title defenses have made him a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame, but outside of it, where he has broken down more fighters more viciously than he has ever done with gloves on. It’s subtle and obvious at the same time; the street philosophies picked up by years of a hard life lived around hard people. And while Hopkins has all the money one man could need and all the luxuries associated with it, when you hear him speak, you could imagine him still sleeping on a stone cot in prison blues just to keep his edge.
Jermain Taylor, Hopkins’ challenger this Saturday night, has told me that you don’t need to get mad to box. This is a sport to the unbeaten Arkansan and to most professional boxers. It’s not to Hopkins. Sport is hitting a ball with a bat or shooting a ball into a net. Boxing is designed to inflict pain on another human with your fists, to impose your will on him by whatever means necessary, and most importantly, in the case of ‘The Executioner’, outthink him.
The mind games with Taylor began at the kick-off presser in New York, and have continued ever since. What has to make it even worse for Taylor is that Hopkins isn’t looking him in the eye and denigrating him or threatening to knock him senseless; he is waging his war through the media – who will take down every morsel uttered from his mouth and put it out to the public. Taylor’s trainer, Pat Burns, has said that he tells his charge not to read or believe the good or the bad written about him – in other words, ignore it. But people talk, people read, and people see and hear the snappy soundbites. As Hopkins described in his ‘Beyond The Glory’ documentary on FSN, when he fought Felix Trinidad in 2001, his act of throwing down the Puerto Rican flag led to people talking and demanding that Trinidad hurt Hopkins for this blatant disrespect. Trinidad got off his game plan and looked for blood. He got it, but it was his own.
So Hopkins has jabbed and jabbed at Team Taylor for the last two months in an effort to get inside the mind of the former 2000 US Olympian, most recently during a media teleconference to promote the bout. Start taking notes kiddies, because school is in session, and I present to you Hopkins’ P.I.T.Y. system of pre-fight mind games.
Praise - The middleweight champ isn’t all fire, brimstone, and bad feelings, as he has gone on record saying that he believes Taylor is the best middleweight in the world after him, and a future champion once he’s gone from the sport. That’s nice. But nice can soften an opponent up a bit in a fight that may not have heated up. Call it Teddy Atlas’ ‘silent contract’, where you’re not going to commit if your opponent has silently decided to not engage either. In this manner, Hopkins has prolonged his career at the top to the virtually unheard of age of 40 as he has taken his time in each fight to get his old bones warmed up. Some fighters may see this tactic as respect.
‘Wow, he must really respect me if he hasn’t gone after me yet.’
Newsflash – he doesn’t respect you. He’s just going to fight when he wants to, and when he does, it will already be too late for you. Take this down - Bernard Hopkins is no nice guy.
Insults - “I think he made it personal because he was told to,†said Hopkins of Taylor. “But I don’t believe that’s in his heart and that’s why I know he’s not real when it comes to the statements that he thinks that he can do this and he can do that. You know he’s being programmed and told to say these things and react and I think you know the man - the guy’s from Arkansas. You know he’s a country boy and he’s sitting back and you know he’s being dictated to because he just don’t know.â€Â
In one fell swoop, Hopkins has dropped a dime on Taylor and the entire state of Arkansas. He is saying that Taylor has no mind of his own, and that since he’s from Arkansas he must be sitting on the porch with some straw in his mouth watching the grass grow. For an intelligent, yet soft-spoken young man like Taylor, this could be a trigger to some truly ‘bad intentions’.
‘I’m programmed?’ Taylor could say Saturday night, ‘Program this.’
Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, as the jab jackhammers into Hopkins’ face.
‘Arkansas? I’ll show you how we do things in Arkansas, Razorback-style.’
Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat.
Or it could backfire as Taylor loses his cool, looks to prove a point and gets caught napping by a Hopkins right to the jaw. Or he could try to battle the ‘Executioner’ on a field where very few in the game today can match him – at the final press conference. If Taylor loses there, it could set the stage for another defeat on Saturday.
Transference - In this crossroads fight between the young gun and the old lion, the storyline has unfortunately (but obviously) become the hate-hate relationship between former friends and business associates Hopkins and Lou DiBella, Taylor’s promoter and the champion’s former adviser. So when Hopkins talks about getting back at DiBella for the $610,000 libel judgment he lost, he’s using Taylor as his vessel for revenge. Said Hopkins of DiBella, “I’m going to act like he’s not even there, like it’s not even important, because I know for a fact that July 16th he’s in the ring. Jermain’s face ain’t gonna look like his face; Jermain’s body is going to be there but his head will be different.â€Â
Ouch. Get the picture? Hopkins is picturing it right now. Taylor, for his part, has taken the high road and opted not to get in the middle of this mess. DiBella has done his best to stay out of the fray, but if he doesn’t release some of that anger and frustration in small doses, he’s likely to have a heart attack. Hopkins? He’s loving it, loving pushing the buttons of his former adviser, and waiting for his chance to beat up DiBella through Taylor.
“I’ve got an opportunity to actually take all that I feel and let it go through my two fists,†said Hopkins. “Ahh it’s a great country. This is a great country where I can go in a ring and do something I love to do and actually assault somebody. I’ve got a personal reason why I want to clock this guy, but I got it controlled because if it ain’t under control I leave myself in danger, so I must let everybody know on the phone that it’s controlled, it ain’t reckless. It’s gonna be controlled anger that’s gonna be displayed July 16th.â€Â
James Toney used to say that he pictured his father every time he fought. Hopkins is using DiBella as his motivation. Taylor’s aim is much simpler – he sees Hopkins’ face everywhere he looks and every time he hits the focus pads on Burns’ hands. Can’t argue with that train of thought, since that’s going to be the only guy trying to hurt him on Saturday night.
Your Livelihood - Now it starts to get a bit heated, though Hopkins will only raise his voice to make sure the entire room hears his sermons. Hopkins told William Joppy that their 2003 fight would be a replay of the tragic Emile Griffith – Benny Paret fight, in which Paret lost his life in the 13th round. If Hopkins-Joppy would have been scheduled for 15 rounds instead of 12, Hopkins may have been a prophet. This time he’s spewing the same kind of venom, saying that if Taylor’s team wants to preserve their fighter for a future title run, they had better stop this fight early before it gets ugly. This has got to play on anyone’s mind, when someone tells you that your life is going to be irrevocably altered by 45 minutes or less in a boxing ring. So what do you do? Play it cool? Nah, you want to tear someone’s head off. But doing that exposes you to any number of negative outcomes once the fists start flying. And for Hopkins, the master craftsman, that’s the point isn’t it? Which leads us to…
Trickery – It’s not part of the P.I.T.Y. system, but you can think of this as the foundation of everything Hopkins has done outside of the ring to establish his superiority inside of it. Think about it – Hopkins is not the fastest, strongest, or most technically talented fighter in boxing today. Floyd Mayweather Jr. he’s not. But he may be the smartest fighter, and is definitely among the hardest workers in the sport. The phrase is “Old age and treachery will triumph over youth and skill,†and when you go down the line, Hopkins has lived by this adage in recent years. Listen to him talk and if you never saw a boxing match before, you would think that he was coming into the ring with two sledgehammers, intent on total destruction with a mere swing of his mighty arms. Instead, he waits, feints, lays traps, and fights in spurts – only when he wants to. It’s not the recipe for ‘must see’ television viewing, but you can’t argue with the results.
Needless to say, Hopkins is the prime example of how boxing is more than just an undisciplined street brawl; how mental acumen and strategy - in and out of actual competition - can allow you to excel. When he spoke last week of his age, and how people have brought up the topic to try to subliminally throw him off his game, his statements could also be applied to his career and the mental games he has used to gain an edge on his opponents.
“It’s like telling a pretty girl that she’s not pretty and she’s got a low self-esteem,†he said. “She’ll start looking in the mirror and asking herself, ‘Am I? You know, I’m not really that pretty like I thought I was.’â€Â
Hopkins has defied the experts by remaining on top of his game at 40. Some of that is due to the pounding of his opponents with his fists, but you can also give credit to the mental beatdowns he has inflicted with his mouth. For him, the fight doesn’t happen when you walk up the steps and hear the opening bell. It begins the day it is signed, and from that day on, it’s like the bandana he and his team wore into the ring when he defeated Felix Trinidad almost four years ago – it’s war.
Then again, when it all comes down to it, you still have to fight, and that little fact is going to provide Jermain Taylor with his best chance of winning the middleweight title.
Maybe.
“Lou DiBella’s not in there with him, Pat Burns is not in with him, his surrogate father is not in there with him,†said Hopkins. “The biggest test is gonna be when it’s fight night and everybody goes down those three steps and you’re left in there with the baddest man on the planet, Bernard Hopkins, and my credentials, and I’m coming in there and the first punch that’s thrown is a punch that’s letting you know from me that this is gonna be either a short night or a slow death.â€Â
That Hopkins, always working it.
courtesy of t.gerbasi @ maxboxing.com
"Old age and treachery will triumph over youth and skill,†Gawd, I LOOOVE that part.
