A fistfight between a 40-year-old man and a 26-year-old opponent hardly seems fair. Bernard Hopkins, the old guy, agrees. He doesn't think Jermain Taylor has a chance in their middleweight title bout.
Hopkins makes his record 21st straight defense of the middleweight title Saturday night against Taylor, who has worked his way from Olympic bronze medal in 2000 to a 23-0 professional record with 17 knockouts. As a measure of how long Hopkins has been at the fight game, Taylor was 13 when Hopkins won his first title of any kind. Indeed, Hopkins' resume had 35 bouts on it by then.
So the way the champion from Philadelphia sees it, everything favors him to continue a streak his promoter -- and one of his victims in the ring, Oscar De La Hoya -- calls "something that will never happen again."
PHOTO: AP
"If you look at me as just an athlete and what I have accomplished, you would be a fool not to respect me," Hopkins said on Wednesday.
"People talk boxing. I live boxing. This is an edge I have that Jermain Taylor has not experienced. If you don't believe that, I can't sell you nothing," he said.
What Hopkins is always selling is himself. Since getting out of prison in 1988 after serving nearly six years for armed robbery, he's been trying to prove his worth. Even though his overall record of 46-2 with one draw -- including a loss in his first fight -- is one of the best in boxing history, he still claims there are doubters.
Hopkins targets them as much as he does his opponents in the ring.
"I'm going to continue to do it as an athlete in the ring so when I leave the ring [next year,] I'll still be the best," he said.
Taylor clearly realizes this is the biggest battle of his boxing career. Bigger than the Olympics.
"Back then, I had the whole Olympic team with me. We were just a bunch of kids out there to have fun. This is different, the culmination of a dream, why I got into boxing," he said.
"I've been waiting a long time for this. It's what I want," Taylor said.
Taiwanese tennis veteran Hsieh Su-wei (謝淑薇) and her Latvian partner Jelena Ostapenko finished runners-up in the Wimbledon women's doubles final yesterday, losing 6-3, 2-6, 4-6. The three-set match against Veronika Kudermetova of Russia and Elise Mertens of Belgium lasted two hours and 23 minutes. The loss denied 39-year-old Hsieh a chance to claim her 10th Grand Slam title. Although the Taiwanese-Latvian duo trailed 1-3 in the opening set, they rallied with two service breaks to take it 6-3. In the second set, Mertens and Kudermetova raced to a 5-1 lead and wrapped it up 6-2 to even the match. In the final set, Hsieh and
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