By William Mackay: Former super middleweight champion Joe Calzaghe doesn’t think 46-year-old WBC light heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins is really serious about wanting to fight WBO light heavyweight champion Nathan Cleverly in 2012.
Calzaghe sees Hopkins as someone looking for one last big payday and Calzaghe feels that the money won’t be there for a Hopkins-Cleverly fight for Bernard to take that option.
Calzaghe told the BBC Sport “I don’t think he [Hopkins] has any intention of fighting Nathan. Bernard Hopkins is a 46-year-old man looking for a big, big payday against a big name fighter. Hopkins will only fight if he gets a big payday and a big name. Nathan is in the early part of his career and…he is not a big name in America.”
Those are my thoughts as well. I’m sure a Hopkins-Cleverly fight will sell out an area in Wales but it won’t translate into a fight that boxing fans in the United States will care about and want to see.
If Hopkins sticks a fight like that on pay per view, it will be lucky to bring in 20,000 PPV buys at best. Hopkins recent fight with Chad Dawson was rumored to have low PPV numbers in the 40,000 range. If fights Cleverly, it’ll far, far worse because only hardcore boxing fans know who Cleverly is in the U.S and even those fans haven’t seen much of him because he’s just starting his career.
Hopkins has far better options than a fight with Cleverly such as IBF super middleweight champion Lucian Bute, Mikkel Kessler, Carl Froch or Beibut Shumenov. There are no huge stars that are out there for Hopkins to fight like Calzaghe, but a fight against Bute would be big in Canada. Hopkins would do better to fight a rematch with Jean Pascal rather than wasting time fighting someone that boxing fans have never heard of like Cleverly.
To be sure, Cleverly holds a title but he might as well be holding nothing because his name means nothing in the United States. And Cleverly’s next opponent, American Tommy Karpency, won’t help him pick up any fans in the U.S because Karpency is a complete unknown in the U.S as well. He may be American, but U.S fans have never seen him on television before, so this is a wasted fight for Cleverly.
Cleverly badly wants to fight Hopkins, thinking that it will make him a household name in the U.S and win him a lot of fans. However, that’s just not going to happen even if Cleverly does get a Hopkins fight. Hopkins is seen as an old over the hill fighter now by a lot of fans after his last fight against Chad Dawson, and even if Cleverly were to beat him, he would be seen as a younger fighter beating someone who is shot. Dawson isn’t a huge star after his last fight against Hopkins, and he probably still wouldn’t be a star even if Hopkins dares to fight him again and gets badly beaten. It takes more than beating a guy that’s about to turn 47 this month to make a star in the U.S. Hopkins isn’t the key to the kingdom. For Cleverly to become a star, he has to beat the following fighters: Dawson, Shumenov, Tavoris Cloud and Andre Ward. If he beats those guys, Cleverly will be a star here. The problem is Cleverly probably couldn’t even beat Shumenov, and the rest of those fights would likely result in Cleverly get soundly beaten. So I’d have to say his chances of becoming a star in the U.S are nonexistent.
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