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By JOHN C. COTEY, Times Staff WriterThe undisputed middleweight champ plans to beat Taylor, embarrass promoter.
LAS VEGAS - There is confident.
And then there is Bernard Hopkins.
To hear the undisputed middleweight champion tell it, Saturday's fight against Jermain Taylor at the MGM Grand is over. That may not be a good strategy if you are trying to sell pay per views for HBO, but for Hopkins, it's the only way he knows.
Lose? Can't.
Quit? Never.
Win? Always.
"I'm the better fighter, I'm the better athlete and I'm the experienced athlete," Hopkins said. "So when you put that all together ... "
You get, according to Hopkins, your winner and still the middleweight champion of the world.
Thing is, it's not enough for Hopkins (46-2-1, 32 KOs) to believe it. He wants you to believe it, to know it and to embrace it, and he'll keep saying it until you do.
Most of all, he wants Taylor (23-0, 17 knockouts) to believe it. Until then, he won't stop telling the world at every turn there is no possible way the 26-year-old former Olympian, a 2-1 underdog but slowly growing on bettors, can derail one of the sport's great careers.
In the verbal battle leading up to Saturday, it's been Hopkins by TKO.
But the Taylor camp thinks a desperate and aged Hopkins - he is 40 - might be trying to talk himself into thinking he can win. Taylor's trainer, Pat Burns, has likened Hopkins to a veteran pitcher who is crafty but has lost his fastball.
"I just think it's all a lot of talk," Taylor said at Wednesday's final news conference. "He knows what time it is."
Time to move over?
In due time, Hopkins says. He plans on challenging Tampa's Antonio Tarver if (Hopkins says when, naturally) he beats Taylor, then retiring before his 41st birthday in January.
He said this will be his last fight as a middleweight, a division he has ruled since 1993, when he won the IBF title. He added the WBC and WBA titles in 2001, unifying the division by knocking out then-unbeaten Felix Trinidad.
In all, Hopkins has defended one title or another 20 times, a record for the division and five short of the all-time mark set by Joe Louis.
Taylor and St. Petersburg's Winky Wright are expected to take over the division when Hopkins leaves. There are many others Hopkins thinks will cheer his exit, however it comes.
"In this particular fight, so many people want to see Bernard bite the dust," Hopkins said. "To be honest with you, Jermain Taylor is gonna look like 30 different people. I've got 30 different people that I know that if I stop breathing in 10 seconds, they'll have a party and they'll have free Cristal for everybody."
Until then, they will have to wait, even if the future seems to be tilting toward Taylor, the fighter many think is Saturday's bigger and stronger man.
"I just hope people don't make an excuse that he's so old and forget that they was calling me old," said Hopkins, who recently won an ESPY award for best boxer. "I want no excuses when Bernard Hopkins makes Jermain Taylor look amateurish."
A victory Saturday would be doubly sweet for Hopkins, because while firing barbs at Taylor, he also has carried out a very public vendetta against promoter Lou DiBella, who works for Taylor after splitting from Hopkins.
They had a public falling out in 2001. In an interview writer shortly thereafter, the outspoken Hopkins accused DiBella of extorting $50,000 from him to secure HBO dates.
DiBella sued Hopkins for libel and was awarded $610,000 in 2003, a decision upheld by an appeals court in April. It is the biggest of a number of problems between the two men.
Hopkins has fed off the extra motivation. His stated goal is to shut down DiBella's company by wrecking his most prized fighter, while DiBella has maintained Hopkins' era is coming to an end and the future is Taylor.
"I cannot and will not lose," Hopkins said. "I'd rather be carried out on a stretcher than lose that fight to that particular person and give them the day in the sun. That's my motivation, but Jermain Taylor's gonna be the whupping boy of my - what you call - controlled frustrations.
"Jermain Taylor is the closest guy I can go ahead and physically hurt and physically beat up without going to jail. See, I can't hit the other guy."
But make no mistake, he knows who the real threat is Saturday night. By then, DiBella will be a footnote and Hopkins will get his chance to leave the middleweight division on his terms.
"Lou DiBella's not in there with him, Pat Burns is not in with him, his surrogate father is not in there with him," Hopkins said. "The biggest test is gonna be when it's fight night and everybody goes down those three steps and you're left in there with the baddest man on the planet, Bernard Hopkins, and my credentials, and I'm coming in there and the first punch that's thrown is a punch that's letting you know from me that this is gonna be either a short night or a slow death."