Froch: I don’t want to fight Bernard Hopkins; it’s a lose-lose situation

By Boxing News - 02/06/2015 - Comments

froch563478After mentioning a potential fight against 50-year-old Bernard Hopkins (55-7-2, 32 KOs) for the summer, the 37-year-old Carl Froch (33-2, 24 KOs) is now saying that he’s not interested in taking a fight against the aging legend due to it being a situation where he wouldn’t get much credit, if any, if he beat him and he’d get dumped on it he were to lose due to Hopkins’ age.

Froch had said in an earlier interview that he could fight twice in 2015, but if that’s going to happen then it’s going to need to be against someone besides Hopkins. Froch already is very, very interested in facing Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. However, Chavez Jr has a fight scheduled against Andrzej Fonfara on April 18th, and this means it’s going to be kind of difficult to get a fight against him scheduled for the summer unless the fight takes place in the late summer.

With the way that Chavez Jr takes head shots, he’s probably going to get cut up against Fonfara, and those cuts will likely take at least 3-6 months to heal. It’s very unlikely that Chavez Jr will be able to return to the ring after just two months after his fight against Fonfara in order to face Froch in June. Heck, even July or August will likely be too soon for Chavez Jr to return back to the ring if his fight with Fonfara is a grueling one.

“Because he is 50 and a legend I don’t want to fight him because it is almost a lose-lose situation,” Froch said via the BBC Sport. “I am expected to beat him. If I win people will say ‘he beat a 50-year-old man’. If I lose people would say ‘what’s going on? You’ve ruined your legacy. You finished your career on a loss against an old man’ – so that would be traumatic. I don’t think for one minute I would lose against Hopkins. It would be a great fight and a fight I would win in style.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLAZAlHGBLs

Froch can talk about him beating Hopkins, but we really don’t know what would happen in that fight. Froch could lose. But what Froch is right about is the fact that he probably wouldn’t get much credit from knowledgeable boxing fans, who would see him as picking on an older fighter in order to pad his record instead of facing someone younger like Gennady Golovkin, Adonis Stevenson, Jean Pascal, Andre Ward, Andre Dirrell, Anthony Dirrell, James DeGale, or Sergey Kovalev. Those are obviously the guys that Froch should be facing rather than taking on an aging fighter like Hopkins, or an inactive guy like Chavez Jr.

Hopkins could give Froch a real nightmarish fight if he chooses to smother him the way Andre Ward did in his one-sided win over Froch in the Super Six tournament in 2011.

Hopkins knows how to smother an opponent, and if he chose to fight like that against Froch, it would be a situation where Froch would be as helpless as a baby. Froch doesn’t have an inside game, and he wouldn’t know what to do to get some punching room to get his shots off against Hopkins.

“If it comes to it and that fight against Chavez Jr is available then I’m obviously not going to rule it out even if the Hopkins fight takes place,” Froch said to the Nottinghampost.com.

I can’t wait to see who Froch will be fighting this year besides Chavez Jr. He says he might fight twice this year, but unless one of those guys are James DeGale, I just can’t see it happening.



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