By Chris Williams: The December 18th, light heavyweight match-up between World Boxing Council (WBC) champion Jean Pascal (26-1, 16 KO’s) and former light heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins (51-5-1, 32 KO’s) is now on, as the 45-year-old Hopkins signed the contract for the bout today. This is great news, because we now will get a chance for Pascal to take the reigns from Hopkins, who is still considered by many to be the best fighter in the light heavyweight division. The fight will likely take place at the Bell Centre, in Montreal, Canada, which is where Pascal fights most of his bouts. Pascal, 27, already signed the contract for the fight and is raring to go.

However, the bout will be a pay per view fight and will be shown on Showtime, according to boxing news from Dan Rafael is ESPN. This fight, as interesting as it is, might not be PPV worthy unless they put a good undercard with it. Hopkins is pretty old now, hasn’t been very active in the past couple of years, and has looked mediocre in his last two fights against Enrique Ornelas and Roy Jones Jr. Pasca is virtually an unknown fighter in the United States. Golden Boy Promotions can put this fight on PPV, but it’s probably not going to do very well at all, even with a sensational undercard filled with prospects. They’re talking about putting Librado Andrade on the undercard vs. WBA super middleweight champion Dimitri Sartison. That’s not interesting for me, because I already seen Sartison get spanked by Mikkel Kessler, so I don’t see him as being worthy to pay to watch. Also, I already saw Andrade get totally shut out by Kessler and stopped recently by IBF super middleweight champion Lucian Bute. I don’t want to pay to see a couple of guys that were beaten by other fighters. I’d rather see Bute fight, but not against Brinkley. No thank you.

The problem is a bunch of prospects in mismatches aren’t going to bring in huge PPV numbers, and neither will Hopkins vs. Pascal in the U.S. They might want to put this on regular cable. I know Shane Mosley is fighting Sergio Mora in a pay per view bout on Saturday, but Mosley is fairly popular, and Mora will be able to draw from a fairly significant Hispanic community to attract a lot of PPV buys. I don’t see that happening with Hopkins-Pascal. We don’t have a massive amount of Canadians in the U.S., and Hopkins hasn’t been very active lately.

HBO reportedly wasn’t interested in showing this fight, and I can certainly understand that. Hopkins didn’t bring in big PPV numbers for his fight with Jones in April, and that fight was painfully boring to watch. It was worse than boring. It was an ordeal for me to watch. I had to have a little scotch and mix it with some coffee to see some entertainment value in a fight that lacked action of any kind. And Hopkins’ fight with Ornelas was pretty much the same. Pascal just isn’t well known in the United States, and it seems like a nice fight that should be on regular cable, preferably on an undercard involving some well known fighters. I don’t see this fight as a main event, not even if Hopkins was in his prime.

Pascal is coming off the biggest win of his career in defeating Chad Dawson by an 11th round technical decision last month on August 14th. Pascal fought the perfect fight, and was able to whether the storm when Dawson had him hurt in the 11th with some huge punches. The fight was stopped after the two fighters clashed heads and it opened up a huge cut above the left eye of Dawson. Pascal looked blazing fast in that fight and very powerful. On defense, Pascal was hard to hit and gave Dawson problems all night long. Hopkins is really going to have to reach deep to beat a fighter like Pascal. This isn’t the kind of fighter that Hopkins can beat with a gimmick like the punch and grab technique. That won’t work against Pascal. Hopkins is going to have to bring something better than that to get a win, in particular because the fight will be taking place in Canada.