by James Slater: It has been almost two weeks since the Joe Calzaghe-Bernard Hopkins fight, yet the 43 year old Hopkins is still angry at how two of the three judges scored the bout in Las Vegas. In an article that appeared on ESPN recently, “The Executioner” spoke of his ill feeling and anger towards the result that cost him his Ring magazine light-heavyweight championship belt.
Hopkins told ESPN:
“I believe I did enough to win. There’s nothing else I could have done in that fight, other than knock him out. I believe I made Joe look ordinary, like I said I would. I said I’d make him look amateurish, which I did. My punches hurt him every time I threw a punch. I cut him. It was an old fox veteran fight..”
Hopkins was especially angry with the scorecard of the recently retired judge, Chuck Giampa. Giampa, as fans will recall, had the fight scored as an overwhelming win for Calazghe – at 116-111. Now that he’s retired as a judge, Hopkins is no less angry at the card Giampa turned in.
“He [Giampa] retired two weeks too late,” Hopkins told ESPN. “I don’t think my fight with Calzaghe was a landslide, but the nine rounds he gave to Joe Calzaghe was totally ridiculous,” the 43 year old added.
Hopkins then went even further and implied that Giampa’s decision to retire so soon after April 19th’s fight was not a coincidence.
“Is he getting pressured? Is there something out there that we don’t know about right now, like when a politician retires before [trouble] hits the fan?” Hopkins asked. “Or maybe he realised he was just too damn old to do the judging,” B-Hop also said.
Though he will no doubt continue to come across as a sore loser to most, Hopkins did raise a valid point when he questioned whether or not ageing judges can do their job as effectively as they did when they were younger.
“People should realize that boxing officials have to be re-evaluated just like an ageing driver,” Hopkins declared. “There has to be some test or evaluation to see if the people who judged fights when they were younger have lost something as they got older. If a fighter or trainer can lose what they were good at one time in their career, anybody can become not as good as they used to be. That goes for fighters, that goes for judges and it goes for referees,” Hopkins continued.
Maybe he has a point. Should a mandatory retirement age possibly be put into force for judges also? Whatever the case, and however you view the subject, nothing can alter what happened on April 19th. And Bernard Hopkins, whether he likes it or not, knows this.