HOPKINS SHINES WITH FINAL LIGHT

by Ron Borges

Of all his many accomplishments in boxing, perhaps his last was the most remarkable. Bernard Hopkins went out on top.

Few champions leave the ring for the last time with a title belt clasped about their waist. Most, in fact, leave as Antonio Tarver left Boardwalk Hall Saturday night in Atlantic City after being belted into submission by Hopkins for 12 harsh rounds. They leave wearing sunglasses at midnight to hide battered and half-closed eyes from the stinging glare of even the moon's low-wattage brightness.

Tarver had entered the arena several hours earlier as the undisputed light heavyweight champion of the world. He was a man intent on proving to what he believes are his many doubters and detractors that he was more than they thought he was. More than a convenient champion who happened to be in the right place at the right time, which was in the ring the night an aging and slowed Roy Jones, Jr. began to slip.

Hopkins had warned Tarver before they met that the Jones he had beaten was far from the one Hopkins had succumbed to back in 1993, before either of them had done enough to become legends of their time. Although he promised this would be his last fight, the 41-year-old former middleweight champion cautioned Tarver and the world that he would not go quietly into that good night. He would not limp into retirement clutching one final payday while letting his pride slip out of his hands. He would fight.

Many doubted Hopkins however, a state of mind that has been a constant theme throughout his own career as well. They doubted that after losing two straight close, disputed decisions to the young middleweight Jermain Taylor he could rally for one last epic performance, even against a 37-year-old champion like Tarver.

The wiseguys in Las Vegas made Hopkins a 31/2 to 1 underdog and the Boardwalk wiseguys in Atlantic City agreed. He was a fighter moving up two weight classes in his final fight, moving from 160 pounds to 175 for the first time since he'd made his debut in the same seaside city in southern New Jersey 18 years ago. That first night Bernard Hopkins lost a split decision and didn't fight again for 15 months. When he finally returned it was as a middleweight, a division he stayed in for all but the final night of his career, eventually dominating it so clearly he defended that title a record 20 times before it ended up in Taylor's hands last year.

But moving up in weight was unwise, the wiseguys felt. A sign that perhaps he was either unwilling to pay the price to condition his body fully for one final fight or that he was overreaching in a vain attempt to win one more title belt before he left. The wiseguys and Antonio Tarver were both wrong. Bernard Hopkins knew what he was doing.

He knew how to prepare for the move up to 175, hiring well-known nutritionist and strength and conditioning guru Mackie Shilstone to prepare his body and mind for the change in body mass he would undergo in the same way Shilstone had once successfully prepared Michael Spinks and Jones to jump up two weight classes to fight for, and win, the heavyweight title.

He knew how to prepare to fight Tarver as well. Along with co-trainers Brother Nazim Richardson and John David Jackson, they devised a plan of attack Tarver never expected because that's what it would require.

It would require that Hopkins, content to be a counter puncher for most of his career, attack the champion in spots where he would least expect it.

When Hopkins did early in the fight, Tarver seemed to have no idea what was happening or how to answer it. As the rounds wore on and he wore down, Tarver became a baffled victim of unpreparedness. He was a champion adrift, a man unable to see where the punches were coming from or when they would arrive.

"This game is 80 per cent mental,'' explained Hopkins (47-4-1) after winning a lopsided decision in which all three judges awarded him 10 of the 12 rounds they fought. "I did the opposite of what he expected. He thought I'd fight him like I fought Jermain. I fooled them. I knew I couldn't run from him. If I had he would have knocked me out. That's what Roy tried to do (in the fight where Tarver became the first man to knock Jones out). I out-thought Tarver.''

He also outfought him but the one was a result of the other. Hopkins has long been considered a throwback to an age of boxing where fighters were far more skilled in the savage game's nuancest. As he proved against Felix Trinidad and Oscar De La Hoya, among many other beaten opponents, Hopkins is sly as well as savage however. He is, like the mongoose, a predator who is more than he appears to be because he is not only dangerous in his own right but uses your skills against you, compounding his own deadly effectiveness.

Such was the case with Tarver, who grew so unsettled by Hopkins' ability to attack when he didn't expect it and land a clean right hand lead time and time again without leaving himself vulnerable to be countered, that he became mesmerized. Frozen in his tracks. Unsure when to punch and when to retreat, Tarver became a victim waiting for annihilation, never sure from where the attack would come or at what moment. The only thing he was sure of by mid-fight was that he was on a dangerous avenue on a very dark night.

"He was reacting to a lot of things I wasn't doing,'' Hopkins said, explaining why Tarver so often was flinching at Hopkins' feints and so seldom seemed comfortable enough to attack his opponent in the way he had promised when he bet Hopkins $250,000 that the former middleweight champion would be unable to answer the bell for the sixth round.

Ironiically but not coincidentally, it was Hopkins who staggered Tarver in the fifth round, knocking him backwards with a straight right hand lead that forced Tarver to touch the canvas with his glove to regain his balance. Rightly ruled a knockdown, Tarver was never quite as self-assured after that. He had been attacked when he felt he was free to attack and although his legs quickly composed themselves, it seemed his mind never did.

After that one-sided exchange nearly led to his early demise rather than the promised fall of Hopkins, Tarver seemed to be a baffled man trying to decipher road signs in some foreign language he failed to grasp. He was wandering into unseen punches and flailing away at his crouching opponent with wild, winging shots that seldom found their mark but often exposed him to attack.

"It's known in the book that when a southpaw faces an orthodox fighter he's open for the right hand,'' Hopkins said after the fight, "but I'm open for his left hook, too. It's who gets there first. I had to get my right hand in without sacrificing myself totally. I threw the right hand a lot and got out of the way to be countered so Tarver couldn't really time me.

"I knew I had to be first this time. I was stronger but I still had my middleweight mobility. I wasn't a sitting tank all bloated up.''

Because of his weight gain, some feared Hopkins might struggle carrying an extra 14 pounds around for 12 rounds, thus slowing his foot and hand speed and limiting his mobility and range of motion. Nothing could have been further from what happened for it was Tarver, not Hopkins, who seemed to the bloated tank. But that impression was not because he had had to work his way down from the 220 pounds he weighed while filming the latest installment in the ROCKY movie series but rather from the mind-numbing, reflex slowing effects of the mongoose's varied attacks.

Shilstone had told Hopkins many times during their training sessions together in New Orleans that for this fight "he had to be the mongoose. Tarver was like the cobra. If he just nicks you, you're gone. So Bernard had to fight like the mongoose. Always ready to strike off of what the cobra does.''

It was an odd assortment of counter moves, some of them born from Hopkins attacking when Tarver least expected it and other times the product of countering the champion's moves with faster hands and a more facile mind. But it was also something more. It was the perfect reading of the tapes Richardson and Jackson had studied of Tarver's fighting style.

"We told Bernard he had to push Tarver back because if you don't he can look like he's doing something when he isn't,'' Richardson explained. "He has all that amateur experience (as a former Olymian) and amateurs know how to steal rounds.

"Tarver also likes to double up with his left hand but if you walk away from him he doesn't even throw. So we had Bernard moving away more too. His (right) jab is just a pawing search for a way to land his jab but if you make him face some danger he's all left hand. If you attack him, he can't do anything.''

And so the mongoose attacked when Tarver expected him to wait and waited when Tarver feared he was approaching. Off balance all night, Antonio Tarver ended up in the most unusual of positions for him. He ended up not only defeated but silenced, becoming the mouth that didn't roar.

"What can you say?'' said the man who always seems to have something to say. "You have to take your hat off to Bernard Hopkins. I didn't have an answer for his right hand tonight. I give all the praise to Bernard Hopkins. It wasn't my night.

"You have days like this. I had a great training camp but even in the first round I felt something was wrong. I didn't have the pop. The quickness.''

The implication some took from that was that Tarver was hinting that the cost of taking off the 46 pounds he'd lost had adversely effected his own quickness, making him loggy and unresponsive when he asked his body to react. But that was not the case. The problem was a more difficult one to solve. The problem was not his weight, unless one meant the weight of Bernard Hopkins' skill and tactics.

The problems Tarver had to deal with were Hopkins' mental acuity and his still evident talent, which together left Tarver often in adrift and in doubt. Doubts about what angle he would be attacked from. Doubts about the wisdom of his own plan. Doubts about his opponent's unexpected abandonment of what Tarver felt sure would be a safety first approach by Hopkins. Doubts about where the holes were in Hopkins' sometimes crouching defensive posture. Doubts, finally, about whether there were any answers for the myriad of ways Bernard Hopkins was beating him up.

"I squatted low like a midget so he couldn't catch me with those long arms,'' Hopkins said. "He had to punch down to hit me and when you punch down you expose your chin. When you punch down your chin is up. I worked on those balance balls in New Orleans every day, squatting back and punching up. He didn't expect to be hit like that.''

Few people expected Tarver to be hit the way - and with the frequency - that Bernard Hopkins assaulted him with. Few outside of Hopkins' tight circle believed he could lift the level of his performance one last time.

When he did, his promoter and former opponent, Oscar De La Hoya, shook his head in wonderment at what he had seen, admiring both at what Hopkins had done to Tarver and what he might still be able to do if he chose to fight on.

"It would be wonderful for my company if he kept fighting but at Golden Boy Promotions we leave it up to the fighter,'' De La Hoya said. "You saw him. He can fight until he's 50!''

Perhaps but Hopkins assured after the fight that there would be no more fights, except with rival promoters in his role as the president of the East Coast branch of De La Hoya's growing promotional company. Despite the brilliance of his final night, a brilliance that left Antonio Tarver's eyes tried to hide behind designer sunglasses, he proved as wise outside the ring as he'd been inside it.

"I'm done,'' Hopkins said. "There's nothing else to do. Let's keep it real, you all. I got no axe to grind with nobody. I just had to expose tonight what this business is all about. I don't need to risk anything else.

"After trying to prove myself all my life since I left prison (at 22) I've learned how to be humble. At the end of the day, I believe love me or hate me, everybody respects me''

Sitting quietly at the opposite end of the dais certainly one man did. Antonio Tarver softly clapped his hands along with the crowd sitting at the post-fight perss conference in muted agreement with the man who had just given him a harsh reminder that, sometimes, an old warrior is still a dangerous one.