Toney Wants Bout with Hopkins – News

By Eric Thomas: With no fights on his schedule, former super middleweight champion James Toney (71-6-3, 43 KOs) is interested in a fight with middleweight great Bernard Hopkins at cruiserweight. In an interview with Boxing Talk, Toney said “The punk [referring to Hopkins] was supposed to fight me at cruiserweight, but you go and run out on me…Here I am, don’t back out like a sissy. Step up to the plate and get knocked out.”

Toney, 40 and soon to 41, is looking for a big named opponent to fight next, and for him Bernard Hopkins would be an ideal opponent. There’s a couple of problems, though, that might make this fight unlikely. First of all, I highly doubt that Toney can make it down to 200 pounds for a fight with Hopkins.

After all, Toney hasn’t fought at cruiserweight for six long years dating back to Toney’s 12-round unanimous decision over Vassily Jirov in April 2003. Since then, Toney has gotten bigger and bigger, weighing as much as 234 pounds. While that may not sound like a compared to monstrous heavyweights like Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko, both of whom weight close to 250 lbs.

However, Toney is only 5’9” and much of the weight that Toney has put on the past six years has been fat, unfortunately. Although Toney has been taking off weight in the past year and recently weighed 230, which is downright skinny for Toney, in his 12-round controversial split decision victory over Fres Oquendo in December 2008, Toney is still way too fat for his own good.

Now, if Toney were to want to get down to 200, it would require a great deal of exercise and dieting for Toney to get down that level. I doubt that Toney could do it, but if he is able to make it down to that weight, Toney would very likely be in terrible shape, and much too weak to fight Hopkins.

That would be much worse than the weight that Oscar De La Hoya had to recently take off for his fight with Manny Pacquiao in December 2008, and we saw how badly De La Hoya performed after stripping down to 147. Hopkins would be coming up in weight from 175, and thus would be stronger than, if not quicker, than he was at light heavyweight.

I think Toney would be in big trouble, too weak to fight at his optimal level and just taking needless punishment from Hopkins for 12 dull rounds. The other problem with this fight is that Toney hasn’t been fighting well in his last five fights, losing two of them to Samuel Peter, winning two of them by split decision over Fres Oquendo and Danny Batchelder and fighting to a 3rd round no contest to Hasim Rahman.

In each case, Toney has looked old, slow and too fat. After Toney was defeated twice by Peter in 2006 and 2007, I thought it was the fat that was causing Toney to look so bad, but after Toney took off a lot of the weight for his fights with Batchelder and Osquendo, I’m now inclined to think it’s just age catching up to Toney.

Toney doesn’t seem to have the size, speed or the ability to fight at heavyweight, but the problem is that Toney has been so big for so long that it’s no likely that he can strip off the weight and still be moderately successful at cruiserweight. Even at that weight class, Toney is still small and undersized.

At any rate, Hopkins wouldn’t likely want to waste time fighting someone like Toney, because Hopkins, 44, wouldn’t get much credit for beating Toney because of James’ poor success in the past couple of years.

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