By Dan Ambrose: Bernard Hopkins thinks his Golden Boy Promotions fighter David Lemieux (34-3, 31 KOs) came into his title unification fight with IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (34-0, 31 KOs) with some glaring flaws in his game that may ultimately cost him the fight at Madison Square Garden in New York.
Hopkins thinks it was a mistake for Lemieux to wear his hair long for the fight, because it kept flopping into his face all during the 12 rounds of action. Hopkins says he would have personally cut all of his hair off rather than go into the fight with hair that was going every which way each time Lemieux would get hit.
The sweat was flying off Lemieux’s head frequently when Golovkin would hit him with a hard shot. To Hopkins, that was something that should have been taken care of before the fight with Lemieux cutting his hair short. Hopkins also felt that Lemieux used a primitive Rocky Marciano type of fighting style instead of him standing tall. Lemieux fought the entire fight with Golovkin in a usual crouching style of fighting, and that was all wrong, Hopkins feels, because it made it easy for Golovkin to hit him with jabs.
“When a guy does something that he normally doesn’t do. I haven’t seen Triple G throw all those jabs,” Hopkins said to Fighthub. “He damn near broke a record with all those jabs. When you’re Lemieux and you have a style where you’re fighting like this [Hopkins then crouches down in an imitation of Lemieux], like Rocky Marcinao in the 50s. You can’t fight like that in 2015. You ain’t coming in at a crouch against someone that’s taller than you and has got a jab. He can’t get past that shotgun jab. That jab was knocking his hair down, and for me, I didn’t like his hairdo. I would have cut the hair bald, because look at the psychological. No way in the world would I go in there with a lot of hair? When you get hit and you’ve your hair wet. It looks good if you’re taking a picture, but when they [judges] see that flying. It could be a punch that glances you. The judges will look at you like you got your hair or your wig knocked back. I’d come in there like this [bald]. Those small subtle things,” Hopkins said.
Hopkins is completely 100% correct in what he was saying about Lemieux in my view. I think Hopkins should have been Lemieux’s trainer for this fight rather than Marc Ramsey, because there’s no way that Lemieux should have come into the fight with the long Mohawk hairdo he was wearing. His hair was not only in his eyes, but his flopping everywhere when he would get hit, and it was showering the audience with sweat. If this was a close fight, the judges might have been influenced by the sweat flying off of Lemieux’s head each time he got hit hard by Golovkin. Lemieux would have been better of cutting off all of his hair and going into the fight completely bald like Hopkins does.
As for Lemieux’s crouching style of fighting, he should have changed that fighting style a long time ago. At 5’9″, Lemieux isn’t tall for the middleweight division. He makes himself even shorter by crouching down two or three inches when he fights. That puts him at the level of the 5’6″ Manny Pacquiao.
Comments are closed.