By Don Caputo

The last morsel of action is coming to a close, the seconds tick, tick, tick away until the final burst of fury is snuffed out by the timekeepers clang. It’s out of his hands now…just like it was last time. The crowd bellow, the cameras pop, and the lights on the roof sparkle like distant stars in a clear night sky. No one is sure who won, and a gust of anticipation swirls and darts around the arena as Bernard Hopkins, standing motionless in the eye of the storm, calmly awaits the verdict.

Things had not played out the way they were supposed to. But ask yourself this, when in his turbulent life had they ever? At the end of another twelve rounds of combat, ‘The Executioner,’ as we have come to know him, allows a grin of self satisfaction to briefly wash across and then disappear from his face. He had, after all, just sneered at nature for the umpteenth time and given it a kick in the teeth for good measure.

He’s forty years old, but his eyes - dark, shadowy rocks eroded and reshaped by the continual smack of life’s harsh and hazardous waves – could well belong to a man twice his age. He has that seasoned, intensely alert, almost suspicious glare of someone who has been through or witnessed everything this unpredictable world dares to throw; the good, the bad, and perhaps more so than anything else, the ugly. It’s all there in his eyes, can’t you see?

The overcast sky is a lifeless, foreboding grey. As the rumblings of thunder grow louder, specs of rain begin to drop from the thick, angry clouds. A quick flash of lightening illuminates the dark and dusty corners of the neighbourhood, but only for a split second. The darkness does not stay away for long, and people soon flock to shelter. The wolves don’t mind the rain though, not like the sheep do. They remain outside and continue to prowl the mean streets of Northern Philadelphia for fresh meat.

Although not yet even a man, his reputation preceded him. A menacing stare or a few carefully selected words were usually all that was required to fill his victims with trepidation, and on the rare occasions it wasn’t…well…let’s just say he got what he wanted far less amicably. He was the wolf all the other wolves feared. In a forest chockfull of untamed beasts, his feral eyes were the wildest; his blood stained teeth the longest and sharpest; his demented snarl, without question, the most terrifying. 

Watch his chiselled body closely in the ring and you might be able to see them…the scars. At school – when he wasn’t suspended – his teachers would say that he would not live to see his eighteenth birthday. He believed them. Only a teenager and already consigned to the graveyard, is it really that surprising he didn’t respect life? A path is lit, he knows the depths to which it will lead him, but he walks it nonetheless. It’s only a matter of time, they say.

There had already been a couple of close calls. When he was fourteen someone punctured his lung with an ice pick, the wound sitting mere inches from his heart. It was over a craps game. A month in hospital and a year later he was stabbed again, this time in the back. He knew his attacker had been wronged in some way, but, after years of inflicting so much wrong onto so many people, he’d be damned if he could remember how.

His mother tried to warn him, but they say ignorance is a closed door. Respect was having gold chains and expensive clothes. Respect was having a pocked full of cash to spend. Respect was being a tough guy.

The culmination of thirty court appearances for a multitude of offences resulted in two consecutive prison sentences for the seventeen-year-old Hopkins. For his crimes, he was facing up to eighteen years behind the metal bars and concrete walls of Graterford State Penitentiary – his soon to be home.

Shoved face first into a packed cage alongside murderers and rapists with nearly two decades of possible incarceration lurching over his head like a teetering branch, he looked deep within himself for the very first time and began asking some profound and difficult questions. The answers were not easy, but he needed only to gaze upon the four walls that surrounded him to find them. From inside a hell, one that he existed in from 1984 through to 1989, he grew an unwavering determination to be a better man.

They used to think he was crazy when he ran around the prison yard. They called him punch drunk. Around and around and around he went, as though chasing a whirlwind, repeating the same words over and over like a man possessed: “Someday, I'm gonna get out of here. Someday, I'm gonna be a champion.” He spoke the words through a cleansed soul…and he believed everyone one.

Shhhh, the winner is about to be announced…here it comes…And still the undisputed middleweight champion of the world…Jermain ‘Bad Intentions’ Taylor.

Bernard Hopkins, at forty, could not quite do enough to reclaim his crown. Standing tall in the middle of the ring, he is proud of himself for a lot of things; for turning his life around when those around him had given up on him. For defending the middleweight title more times than any other fighter in history. And, on this night, for going punch for punch with a young lion thirteen years his junior and feeling like he won.

The torch is finally passed, like it always will be, but not before the old man belied his age one last time and gave us all a surprise – defying the odds is what he does best, remember.