6 years ago today: Bernard Humphrey "Alien" Hopkins, Jr. vs. Beibut Amirhanoviç "No Limits" Shumenov

The final professional victory of B-Hop's career, 24¾ years after his first.

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Kind of weird that it was a SD; ended with a 118-109 card, myself. Weirder still is how little appreciation this post from the RBR got; perhaps the most underrated in the board's history. (granted this was before the introduction of the likes system - and 99% of likes are given to fresh/recent posts as opposed to deep "from the vault" material, which is the only reason my count doesn't currently dwarf the other nine in the top ten combined - I hit my all-time low posting frequency on here during what happened to dovetail with the system's introduction, and thus only got a few hundred thumbs up in the first year or two...but if you were to form a graph of like-per-new-post ratio since implementation, mine would set an impossibly high standard - but still, this gem should have prompted two full pages of "rofl" smilies, damn it...)

 

I was always high on Shumenov's ability, so I rate this win pretty highly for the 49 year old. He was only 30 himself on this night, and yet had the mantle of his prime whipped away, particularly in the second half. Subsequent performances, including a competitive match with BJ Flores (very flatteringly so, to BJ) indicate a different fighter than was consistently pumping out world class form in 2008-2013.

...and yes, I'm well aware that for many people he still has a big asterisk next to his Las Vegas win over Gabriel Campillo in their rematch - and yes, he deserved to lose that one. But what is little-known is that in their previous encounter, in his own backyard in Kazakhstan, oddly enough Campillo had actually gotten a road gift in a fight that probably should've gone Shumenov's way. So in reality they're knotted 1-1 just as they should be - although with the official results swapped around.

 

Being able to "like" posts. We never had it on vBulletin, and the feature was activated sometime after the admins ported everything over to Xenforo (another forum software, and currently in use here).

The overwhelming majority of my post-whoring (my 100+ daily post average, fielding 99% of the RBR threads, etc.) came during the vBulletin era.

 

Which is all to say, Hopkins was still operating at pretty high levels in 2014. His absolute best? No, he was already in some measure of decline; he was on 50's doorstep FFS. Bottom line is Kovalev should receive some credit for beating more or less the same version of The Alien later this same year. Smith, however, catching him in 2016 with two years of rust, past 50, with the brutal 12 rounds against Kovalev in the rear-view? Eh, significantly less credit. Maybe like 60% of what Kov gets, max...)

 

IB funfact:

Hopkins is two years older than Mike Tyson. Hopkins' first professional victory happened eleven days after Tyson lost his zero and immortal aura to Buster Douglas in Tokyo.

 

Um, today's date is today's date.

 

It was an interesting trend we saw develop in the late aughts through early teens: several fighters in former Soviet Bloc countries (Dmitry Pirog in Russia, Beibut Shumenov in Kazakhstan, and Proksa in Poland), for wont of any world class trainers immediately accessible in their areas, basically reached contender or championship level status in boxing virtually auto-didactically.

Pirog, Shumenov and Proksa each has a unique style, with all three wildly different from one another - but it always struck me as fascinating that all of them did more or less the same thing (patterning themselves largely on American boxers they watched footage of) at more or less the same time.

 

The schooling of Pavlik was at least as great a performance as the schooling of Trinidad, yes.