Bernard Hopkins biography
Bernard Hopkins, (born January 15, 1965, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.), American boxer who dominated the middleweight division within the early 2000s with a mixture of pace and precision that earned him the nickname “The Executioner.”
Hopkins was concerned in avenue crime as a young person, and at age 17 he was convicted of armed theft and sentenced to jail. He served 56 months, throughout which period he took up boxing, and after his launch on parole in 1988, he maintained a clear file. He had his first skilled bout on October 11, 1988, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, however he was unable to earn a dwelling as a full-time boxer and supplemented his revenue by washing pots and pans within the kitchen of a Philadelphia lodge. Later he labored at an auto transmission restore store owned by his coach, Bouie Fisher. Hopkins received the vacant International Boxing Federation (IBF) middleweight title by knocking out Segundo Mercado within the seventh spherical on April 29, 1995, in Landover, Maryland, however even with this victory behind him, he struggled to search out significant bouts.
Although extremely revered for his formidable expertise and dedication, Hopkins continued to toil in relative anonymity till 2001, when he entered a match organized by promoter Don King to unify the middleweight title. In the primary bout of the sequence, on April 14 in New York City, Hopkins retained the IBF title and received the World Boxing Council (WBC) model with a 12-round resolution over Keith Holmes. In his second bout, on September 29 at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Hopkins stopped the beforehand undefeated Félix Trinidad within the twelfth spherical in a significant upset to retain the IBF and WBC belts and win the World Boxing Association (WBA) title. Hopkins thus grew to become the primary unified middleweight champion since Marvin Hagler misplaced the title in 1987. This achievement earned Hopkins Fighter of the Year honours for 2001 from each the Boxing Writers Association of America and Ring journal.
Following 4 extra defenses of the unified title, Hopkins confronted fellow American Oscar De La Hoya on September 18, 2004, in Las Vegas. His ninth-round knockout of the charismatic fighter was a climax in Hopkins’s inspirational journey from the penitentiary to the highest of the boxing world. The win was additionally his nineteenth profitable protection of the middleweight title, a division file. Thanks to his career-long dedication to bodily conditioning and mastery of nearly each side of his craft, Hopkins was capable of compete on the highest degree at an age when most boxers had retired. After a pair of slim losses to Jermain Taylor in 2005, Hopkins moved as much as gentle heavyweight and defeated Antonio Tarver and Ronald “Winky” Wright. In October 2008, having misplaced a cut up resolution earlier within the 12 months to Joe Calzaghe, Hopkins demonstrated that his expertise had clearly not diminished with age when he received a unanimous resolution over beforehand undefeated Kelly Pavlik, who was 17 years his junior. Hopkins adopted that victory with one towards Enrique Ornelas in December 2009 and one other towards Roy Jones, Jr., in April 2010.
In May 2011 Hopkins defeated Jean Pascal to seize the WBC gentle heavyweight title. By so doing, he broke George Foreman’s file and have become the oldest world champion in boxing historical past. Hopkins bested his personal mark 22 months later when he received a unanimous resolution over Tavoris Cloud to change into the IBF gentle heavyweight champion at age 48. In 2014 Hopkins received the WBA gentle heavyweight title by a cut up resolution over Beibut Shumenov, changing into the oldest boxer to unify main titles. Later that 12 months, nonetheless, Hopkins misplaced each belts when he was defeated by Sergey Kovalev in a unanimous resolution. In what was described as his final battle, Hopkins fought Joe Smith, Jr., in 2016. The bout was shut till the eighth spherical, when Hopkins fell out of the ring after being hit by a sequence of punches and was unable to proceed. He ended his profession with a file of 56 wins (32 of which have been knockouts), 8 losses, and a pair of attracts.
Considered an iconoclastic determine inside the boxing trade, Hopkins feuded with promoters all through a lot of his profession, incessantly battling in court docket simply as fiercely as he did contained in the ring. An outspoken advocate of reforming a system that allowed promoters and sanctioning our bodies to have interaction in unethical and unlawful practices, he additionally testified in 1999 earlier than the National Association of Attorneys General Boxing Task Force about corruption and varied different issues inside the sport.