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 su****ious 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? [details]
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 su****ious 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? [details]
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