RECAP: TARVER VS. HOPKINS

June 13, 2006 - by Bert Sugar

For those who thought the lion was asleep just because they hadn't heard him roar lately, that lion in winter better known as Bernard Hopkins roared loudly Saturday night dissembling light heavyweight champ Antonio Tarver into tidier, neater pieces.

With more than a little water added to his vintage wine, Hopkins called on all the ring craft and skill of his 19 years in the ring to reduce the hopelessly polite Tarver into a dispirited, discouraged ex-champion winning virtually every round--although the three judges charitably tossed two rounds Tarver's way probably just for showing up, like students getting 400 points on their SAT's just for writing in their names.

In what was a fight for those who love fistic delicacies, Hopkins, taking a page from the first lesson in How to Fight a Southpaw 101, used his right as a right jab to get inside Tarver's long reach, keeping the soon-to-be-ex-champion off-balance and lumbering around the ring hoping against hope to land his supposedly lethal left.

Almost from the git-go Hopkins used that right to take control of the fight and by the second had raised a welt under Tarver's left eye, causing him to blink like a man trying to blink away a cinder from his eye. In the fifth--the very round Tarver had promised to knock Hopkins out--the man known as "The Executioner" executed one deep-dish beauty of a right to send Tarver stumbling backwards across the ring, touching his glove to the canvas in an effort to remain upright, the mating of glove to canvas counting as a knockdown.

It wasn't to get any better for Tarver as Hopkins continued to thread the needle's eye with his right time and time again. In Tarver's corner trainer Buddy McGirt tried to revitalize his crestfallen charge, exhorting him to "Hit him in the arms," to 'hit him on the shoulders," to hit him anywhere. But Tarver, who was to throw a single-digit number of punches in 10 of the 12 rounds, wasn't responding, the by-now totally disheartened Tarver paying McGirt's urgent pleadings no never mind, his will to win crushed under the accumulating weight of Hopkins' right hands. And before the 12th and final round McGirt was reduced to advising Tarver to "bluff"--translation: do anything just to last out the fight.

It was as masterful a performance as anyone had seen in years as the crafty old warrior used every trick known to boxingkind--angles, feints and right hands--to totally befuddle the heavily-favored Tarver. And a performance which capped a magnificent Hall of Fame career as Hopkins goes off into sunset a true champion--and the first middleweight champion ever to jump up to capture the light heavyweight title, a feat not even the great Sugar Ray Robinson could accomplish.

There will be no farewell tour for Hopkins, a la Barbara Streisand or Frank Sinatra. That's it, as fitting a finale any boxer could wish for, one which will serve as a punctuation point for a glorious career of one of the all-time greats.