It was an especially cruel denounement to the career of a fighter, in Hopkins, who goes out as one of the finest middleweights to ever grace the ring, and who over the last decade had successfully carved out a niche for himself as a fighter for whom Father Time was less a biological fact and more a minor inconvenience. To his credit, he had us all fooled into believing him - believing that, yes, he was so special and unique that he could go on as long as he wanted. We allowed ourselves to consider him a permanent fixture in the ring, convinced that someone so freakishly dedicated to the sport in all its various aspects, who lived the life like no other fighter on the planet, whose attention to every detail was obsessive and who was never less than in top shape, had managed to transcend the ageing process as no Beverly Hills plastic surgeon ever could.
We were wrong. And so was he.
His defeat, the manner of it, was a rude awakening. It brought us to our senses, or at least should have brought us to those senses, when it comes to the notion of putting a 27 year old in the ring with a 51 year old. No matter how dedicated, how great his career, such a notion could only ever be delusional, one that should never have been entertained for a second. And with due respect to Smith an in-prime, even past-prime Hopkins would not have lost a minute of any round in a fight against an opponent of this calibre. However this was not a past-prime fighter in there, it was a man whose pride in thinking he could defy Mother Nature proved his undoing. It bears repeating: in so doing he and those around him were guilty of lapsing into delusion.
Yet we find ourselves in an era in boxing which delusion is the new normal. Consider the evidence. Britain's Amir Khan believing he stood a chance against Canelo given the size difference - delusional: Kell Brook moving up two weight classes to face the hardest-hitting middleweight the sport has seen in generations and believing he stood a chance - delusional: Tony Bellew believing he can match David Haye for power at heavyweight - delusional: and worst of all, Conor McGregor believing he can transition from MMA to boxing and share a ring with Floyd Mayweather - utterly delusional.
The aforementioned does not describe boxing as the sport we all know and love, it describes boxing as a circus - a sport so fixated on PPV buys and generating revenue for promoters and TV networks it has lost touch with its soul.
There is a wider social and cultural issue involved here. Boxing, like every other sport, does not exist in a social or cultural vacuum. To a large extent it reflects the times we live in; and we are living in a time where spectacle is everything and integrity is nothing. In boxing this lack of integrity is not a malaise suffered by those who fight. Far from it. Fighters such as Bernard Hopkins and Kell Brook are the epitome of integrity, men who have earned every plaudit and every purse they ever won. But the system that controls boxing, never known for its purity of heart, has turned into a squalid corporate and money making racket, worse in many ways than it was under the mob back in the day. At least back then the sport and its fans were being humped by people with personality.
The woeful lack of honest boxing writing and journalism is another crucial aspect in boxing's decline as a sport and reinvention as a circus. Most of those we rely on to report on the fights are little more than PR secretaries for promoters and the networks. Holding the sport's powers that be to account on behalf of the fans is a thing of the past, with writers knowing that if they do they will suddenly find their applications for press passes denied and, with it, the privilege of being ringside and close to the action. The result is a chasm between what's being reported and what we see with our own eyes.
In boxing, despite what any promoter or fighter says, weight divisions matter, size matters, and age matters. Bernard Hopkins deserved better than to go out on the back of such a humiliating defeat. What he gave to the sport, his old school style, science, and ring smarts, married to a backstory that is the stuff of movies, elevated him to a venerated position in in the sport. But ulitmately, as clever and astute as he undoubtedly is, that bugbear of every fighter who can't let it go, vanity, got the better of him in the end. His fight against Joe Smith Jr was not boxing it was something else.
The sooner we get back to boxing the better.
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