Bernard Hopkins said Jermain Taylor was a harder fight for him than Joe Calzaghe

Good,solid post. If anyone thinks Hopkins got "battered" by either Taylor or Calzaghe then they need to rewatch those fights clearly. I can understand giving Taylor the rematch but that's it. Hopkins' tactics spoiled Taylor in the first fight & Calzaghe and for effectiveness you have to go with Hopkins for those fights. Hopkins even landed the cleaner blows on Calzaghe few or not. Calzaghe threw alot of flurries but the only things that really landed were singleshots but Hopkins' landed shots were harder and more often than Calzaghe's. I don't know why people go for ineffective aggression......

 

If Calzaghe's aggression was ineffective he would have lost. He won, therefore it was effective.
Hopkins and Calzaghe both landed single shots, not just Calzaghe, you make it seem like Hops was landing combos. Neither could land combos at all. Too much clinching for that.
I really can't understand why some people act like Calzaghe couldn't land a decent shot, his short straight left caught Bernard on a few occasions and they were as good as anything Hops did. Hops only landed one decent shot in the fight and that was the first round and was lucky to catch Calzaghe off balance.

 

Really? You don't think it's a disgrace that the undisputed middleweight champion wouldn't leave his own country to fight the super-middleweight champion?

Why should fighters have to come to America all the time? Why is so ludicrous to expect them to travel once in a while?

Or does it only work the other way. American fighters prove they are the best in the world by fighting at home, with home judges and home referees?

 

I just want to know why if Calzaghe wasn't effective, and was slapping, why Bernard didn't just walk through the slaps and whack him. Seriously. There must have been enough on those slaps to stop Hopkins fighting how he wanted to.

And for any dickhead that posts a severely edited video as "proof" a fighter won, you're a spastic. Anyone can edit a fight to put in their fighters good spots only.

 

As in many Hopkins fights he often lands the cleaner blows, but his activity is too low to impress the judges. It's kind of unfair but it's his fault at the same time. You can't expect to be that inactive and win fights.

 

Put it this way...regardless of what anyone's opinion on who won out of Hopkins vs Calzaghe, the fact remains that Calzaghe manhandled the old racist and simulated anal sex on him in front of a crowd of thousands and a PPV audience of hundreds of thousands - and still Hopkins wasn't able to do anything about it.

End of the day, Hopkins was humiliated by Calzaghe in that ring, specifically for the silly trash talk and racism he was coming out with in the build up to the fight.

These guys promoting this video continue to ignore the elephant in the room - if Calzaghe was so ineffective, why didn't Hopkins just hammer him? Oh, that's right, because it wasn't until after that fight that Hopkins announced he was going to start going for the KO in his fights

If Calzaghe was so ineffective, why did Hopkins start stalling and looking for time-outs later in the fight? Any of Hopkins' faked low blows make it to that video?

And as mentioned before, if Calzaghe was so ineffective, why was he able to prison-**** the convict before the masses? :yep

 

Objective? The few minutes I watched, he slowed it down for every spot where Hopkins did well, claimed Hopkins was landing shots when he didn't, claimed Calzaghe wasn't landing when he was, and then he replayed the solid shots Hopkins landed 5 times in a row.

If someone feels Hopkins won that strongly, more power to them, but don't pass that video off as objective and unbiased. The guy even played the "white favoritism" card for a minute. Since when were white foreign guys such massive draws in the U.S. that they get robberies in big fights now? :rofl

 

every unbiased source in the sport scored that fight for Calzaghe. Deal with it, Calzaghe is a winner and Hopkins should be embarrassed about his low-blow feigning *****-out performance. The homo came out in him that night, I lost almost all respect for him.

And that's just it - Hopkins still is embarrassed over it. Which is why he feels the need to overcompensate by making comments about black fighters (which ones...exactly? - the part he left out....) being able to beat Manny Pacquiao.

The man has so many issues, he's even threatened by Pacman - a guy not even close to his weightclass (or era, for that matter LOL).

 

I didn't say Hopkins was landing combos but he did a little bit on the inside. His shots were harder and Calzaghe was ineffective as he wasn't landing much if anything during flurries. Hopkins landed 1 clean shot the whole fight? I'm not going to buy that. Yes he was throwing few shots at a time but he was still landing some clean shots. Calzaghe didn't land enough and Hopkins didn't throw enough. I understand a draw but in no way did Calzaghe do enough to win. Don't you think Hopkins' clinching limited Calzaghe's aggression? He was doing some good inside work a few times and landed some solid punches. Not saying you do but I think people try to see this fight the way they want and not how it went. Many on here need to rewatch this fight to get a better assessment of it as I can't believe some of the posts I read about this fight. I'll rewatch it too but I doubt my mind will change much as I've seen it pretty recently.

 

What I don't get is people highly criticizing Hopkins for his performance in the Calzaghe fight though he was far removed from his prime and an old man. His legacy doesn't revolve around that fight and at the end of the day he's still an ATG and one of the greatest MW's of all time. People act like he hasn't had good fights but that's not true(Joppy,Trinidad,Mercado fights, Echols 2, Baptist, Aquino).

 

I scored the fight by a point for Hopkins. Obviously anyone who places extra value on activity over accuracy, which is the way an awful lot of judges seem to score fights, had Joe winning comfortably. There's nothing wrong with that either, although I don't score that way personally.

Besides the boulder-sized chip Bernard keeps on his shoulder, I don't think this is purely senile hype he's spouting. He didn't knock Taylor down in 24 rounds; he knocked Joe down inside of three minutes. Taylor, for all of his flaws, made it very difficult for Bernard to get into a consistent rhythm, while for two-thirds of the Calzaghe fight, Bernard seemed very able to fight at the pace he wanted to, and land the punches he wanted to. His stamina was clearly weaker than it ever had been down the stretch, and while he did milk the ref into getting some extra rest, he was never remotely hurt or close to being stopped. Rightly or wrongly, he did seem to feel that Taylor's power was something that had to be respected, and rightly or wrongly, he fought him that way.

So yeah, we can write this off as sour grapes, but the old man is probably just calling it the way he sees it. Even he wouldn't say that this necessarily means Taylor is a better fighter. Styles make fights.